Enrichments are a powerful way to enhance your Flipbooks. With them, you can make your digital catalogs come alive with links, images, videos, and animations that will help you showcase your content in a new and exciting way.
Similarly, Shop enrichments allow you to insert product links directly into your Flipbooks, meaning your visitors can browse, and add them to cart, directly from your catalog.
📖 This guide explains:
Creating Shop enrichments manually vs. using enrichment automation
Like other enrichments, you can create Shop enrichments manually in your Flipbook, via the Enrichment Editor. This allows you to get your catalog set up, and shoppable, quickly, and without requiring that you have a product feed ready.
Advantages of manually creating Shop enrichments
Allows you to quickly make your digital catalog shoppable, meaning your visitors can add your products to their cart, and check out from your catalog.
Require little to no preparation or e-commerce infrastructure, such as a product feed.
Disadvantages of manually creating Shop Enrichments
Manually creating many Shop enrichments, is time-consuming.
With manually created Shop enrichments, your visitors have no way of knowing the availability, or stock levels, of the product they are trying to buy.
Creating your Shop enrichments manually is a great way to set up your digital catalog quickly and easily. However, if you plan on creating, and maintaining, many Shop enrichments, consider getting in touch with us about creating an Enrichment automation.
Learn more about it, in our guide:
How to manually create Shop enrichments
Creating Shop enrichments works much like creating any other enrichment:
In the Flipbook tree view, right-click the Flipbook you want to create a Shop enrichment for.
From the drop-down menu, select Open enrichments editor.
This will open your Flipbook in the enrichment editor. You can create Shop enrichments in several ways, such as defining an area of your catalog with Link style, or using media such as an icon, or image.
Create a Shop enrichment using Link style
If the PDF from which you've created your Flipbook already include images of your products, you might want to simply highlight the area and create a shoppable link from it. You can do this using Link style:
In the top-left corner of the Enrichment Editor, select Draw Enrichment (highlighted above).
Using the crosshair, draw in your Flipbook the area which you would like to become your Enrichment.
💡 Holding the Shift key while you draw your Enrichment area ensures you create a perfect square area.
In the Properties toolbar on the right side of the Enrichment Editor, scroll down and select Shop from the Select an enrichment action drop-down menu. This will open up a number of further fields:
Product name: Give your product a name! This field is visible to your Flipbook visitors, and will form the hover text that shows when a visitor hovers over the Shop Enrichment in your Flipbook.
Product price: Set the value on your product. This field accepts number values only, and appends the currency set in your Flipbook's settings to it.
Product description: Use this field to include important product specifications, measurements, or a description that allows your visitors to understand what it is, once added to the cart.
Product ID: If you use an ID system in your business, you can include the product's identifier in this field. Creating a unique product ID will let you easily identify which products have been sold, and in what quantity in, for example, your Flipbook's performance report.
Package size: If a specific product in your catalog is a package deal, you can set the package size to reflect this.
For example, a single price for 2 t-shirts, you can set the package size to 2, which automatically adds 2 t-shirts to the cart, when a visitor selects it.
Prompt for amount: Toggling this option enables users to manually define the number of products they want added to their basket, instead of having to manually add a single product multiple times.
That's it! Make sure to save your Enrichment, and then you're ready to try it out:
Configure your link styles
Want to draw more attention to your links? Add a link style! A link style refers to the way a drawn link appears in the iPaper publication.
When you select a link you've drawn inside the Enrichment Editor, a new button will appear in the top bar:
With this, you can create a link style appropriate for your content, and matches your brand:
Here, you can select from any existing preset link styles you've already created, or create a new one. Once created, simply choose your link to add it to, and select the new link style.
💡 Another way to highlight a Link or an Image would be to add animation to it to draw attention. Read our guide on Enrichment animations, below:
Adding a Hover style
You can define the default Color, Border size, and Opacity of your link styles as they appear when loaded in your digital catalog.
However, you can also define the appearance of how these elements appear when hovered over by a cursor. This is called the Hover style.
To apply a hover style to your links, check the Hover style box:
You will then be presented with the option to set the Color, Border size, and Opacity parameters of the Hover style:
💡 Hover styles rely on your Flipbook visitors hovering over them with a cursor. As such, they only apply to browsing experiences from a desktop browser.
Adding a Highlight style
The Highlight effect makes any links with a hover effect briefly 'flash' their hover effect when the page in the Flipbook they are on is loaded.
This allows your Flipbook visitors to identify clickable links in your Flipbook, at a glance.
💡 The Highlight effect is automatically applied to, and only affects, all link style enrichments that use a Hover effect. This means that if you’ve toggled a hover effect for enrichments in your Flipbooks, they will now show the highlight effect, too, when loaded. You are, however, always able to toggle off the additional highlight effect by unchecking the Highlight style box.
You can easily apply, or remove, a Highlight style from a link style, by checking the Hightlight style checkbox:
Create a Shop enrichment using icons
If you prefer to use a shopping icon that matches your e-commerce website (such as a cart, basket, or something of your choice), you can!
The process is almost the same as above:
In the top-left corner of the Enrichment Editor, select either Insert image from Media Library, then select whether you wish to use:
A single image
An image slideshow
In this example, we'll create our Shop Enrichment with a single image.
From the Media Library, select the icon you want to use for your Shop Enrichment.
Once selected, it'll appear in the top left of your Enrichment Editor. Simply drag your icon to the appropriate position in your Flipbook.
💡 If your image is too big, you can simply resize it!
In the Properties toolbar on the right side of the Enrichment Editor, scroll down and select Shop from the Select an enrichment action drop-down menu.
Now, fill all the fields as described above.
When using an icon for a Shop Enrichment, you have the additional option of selecting a separate icon when the product is added to cart. This creates a visual cue to your visitors that they have successfully added a product to their cart.
That's it! Make sure to save your changes before existing the Enrichment Editor.
Using GIFs as your call-to-action
It's important to make it clear to your visitors, that icons, images etc. are clickable, so consider making your CTAs animated by using a GIF. You can add GIFs the same way you add any other image to your Flipbook, but you can learn more in our guide on adding animated CTAs, below:
How to manually create Shop variants
Often, online retailers sell multiple variants of the same product. For example, this might be a t-shirt available in different colors: black, white, and grey. Alternatively, it could be different sizes.
iPaper Flipbooks support the ability to include variants in manually created Shop enrichments.
Doing so is easy:
In the Enrichment Editor, select either a Link style area, or media to use for your Shop variant enrichment and import it into your Flipbook following the instructions above.
In the Properties tab under the right-hand sidebar, select Shop Item Menu as the enrichment action. This will present you with a number of fields:
Hovertext: This text is visible to your Flipbook visitors when they hover over the Shop variant enrichment. Consider writing a message that makes it obvious to visitors that there are multiple variants available.
Icon when any variant is in basket: You can select an alternate icon, that is visible when any variant is added to the cart. This creates a visual cue to your visitors that they have successfully added a product to their cart.
Prompt for amount: Toggling this option enables users to manually define the number of products they want added to their basket, instead of having to manually add a single product multiple times.
Shop items: Here you can see any product variants you have added to your Shop variant enrichment. You can edit any existing variants by clicking the ✎ pencil icon. You can also delete any existing variant by clicking the 🗑️ trash icon.
You can add further, new variants to your Enrichment by clicking on ADD NEW SHOP ITEM.
That's it! Remember to save your changes before you leave the Enrichment Editor.