Digital catalog maker: turn a PDF into a shoppable catalog

You export the season to PDF and email it to your buyers. It is heavy enough that some of it bounces off attachment limits, and the buyers who do open it are pinch-zooming a spread on a phone. Nothing on the page links to the product page where the order actually happens.

A catalog and a linesheet read nothing alike

Both come out of the same design file, so they usually ship as one document, and then neither one works. A buyer hunting for case packs does not want to scroll past lifestyle spreads.

• Retail catalog: lifestyle photography, few words, one product per page. It persuades, and it is priced or unpriced depending on the channel.
• Wholesale linesheet: SKU, colorways, size breaks, case packs, wholesale and RRP, minimums, all shot on white. Dense is correct here.
• Price list: a reference document that changes often. Keep it out of the catalog so you can correct a price without re-exporting the whole book.

Most brands need two of the three. Two projects still fit inside the three the free plan gives you, and splitting them now is cheaper than untangling them mid-season.

Twenty to sixty products is where flipping still works

Under twenty products, an ordinary page on your site does the job with less ceremony. Over about eighty, readers stop turning pages and start hunting for a search box, which means the content wanted to be a store. The range that reads well is 12 to 30 pages at one to four products a page.

Page count is not what makes a flipbook heavy to turn. Sheets more than eight away from the one you are on are set invisible and skip their flip work entirely, so a turn costs the same at page 4 and at page 140. What does grow with length is texture memory, one image per page side, and on free the 50 MB storage ceiling arrives before that becomes your problem.

A hotspot turns the spread into a shop entrance

A printed catalog ends at the page. In i3Dify you tap a product in the editor, drop a hotspot on it, and paste the URL of that product page, so the buyer taps the shoe and lands on the shoe rather than on your homepage. Attach your UTM parameters to that link and catalog-driven orders show up on their own line in your store analytics.

Put the order link and your contact details on the cover and the last page, because those are the two pages everyone sees. Hotspots link out, they do not add to cart, so checkout stays where it already works. The product catalog template covers embedding the finished thing in any storefront that allows custom HTML.

The link survives the season, the PDF does not

A printed catalog is wrong the morning a product sells out. Keep one project per season as an archive, plus a current catalog at a stable URL that is the only one you ever hand out. Replace the PDF behind it and the URL does not move, so bookmarks, embeds and the QR code already printed on the trade show banner keep working. The three-step walkthrough covers upload to publish.

Per-page view time tells you where they quit

Total views is a vanity number. Time per page is the one worth acting on, because a consistent drop at page four usually means page four is where the density jumped or the good products ran out. Reorder the spreads and watch the drop move.

Those analytics come with Pro at 3 dollars a month, together with a custom domain and removal of the branding pill. The free plan holds 3 catalogs and 50 MB, and it always shows the i3Dify pill in the corner of the viewer.

A catalog that opens in a browser is one a buyer can forward to their boss before approving the order, and every product on the page sits one tap from the page that takes the money.

Turn your catalog PDF into a flipbook.