Shoppable catalogs on Shopify: from your products to a flipbook customers can buy from

A PDF catalog on a Shopify store is a dead end. It looks good, then the reader has to leave it, search the store and find the product again. A shoppable catalog keeps the pages and removes the detour: every product on a page can be added to the cart or opened from the page itself.

Real3D Flipbook builds that catalog two ways. From the products in your store, with no PDF at all, or from a PDF you already have, by placing hotspots on it. Both end up as the same flipbook, embedded in the theme or shared as a link.

Build the catalog from your products

Open the app, create a catalog and pick either individual products or a whole collection. Choose a layout; there are more than ten, from photo-led lookbook spreads to dense line sheets. The pages are generated from the product data: photos, titles, prices, variants and descriptions. Nothing has to be laid out by hand.

A few things you can adjust before saving:

• Order and visibility. Drag products into the order you want. Hide a product without removing it. Pick which variants of a product appear.
• Prices. Turn them off for a lookbook, keep them on for a catalog. On the Pro plan, line sheets can show wholesale prices and SKUs.
• Cover and back cover. Set the title, intro text and the closing page. Texts and colors are customizable from the Standard plan; on Free the catalog uses the Minimal style.

Draft and archived products are left out, so what you publish is what is actually for sale.

Keep it in sync

Product data changes: prices move, items sell out, products get unpublished. The published flipbook updates whenever you save the catalog. On the Pro plan, live sync goes further: prices are read on every view and products that are no longer published drop out of the flipbook on their own, so a catalog shared months ago still shows current prices and no dead products.

Make an existing PDF shoppable

If the catalog already exists as a PDF, upload it and open the page editor. Draw a hotspot over a product photo and pick the product from your store. The hotspot gets an Add to Cart or View Product button; the reader taps it and the product panel opens over the flipbook, without leaving the page. The same editor adds plain links, videos and YouTube embeds to any page.

This is the quickest route for a seasonal catalog your designer already produced. The product data comes from Shopify, so prices and availability in the panel are always the store’s.

Where the catalog goes

• On any page of the theme, through the app block in the theme editor. Inline, or as a lightbox opened from a cover image, which works well on a collection page or the home page.
• Anywhere else, with the embed code.
• As a direct link, for emails, social posts and wholesale buyers who never open the store itself. The link page shows the flipbook full screen.

PDF links inside the flipbook keep working, so a catalog can point at other pages and documents as before.

For wholesale buyers

B2B is where the format earns its keep. A line sheet layout lists SKUs and wholesale prices per variant, buyers can export the catalog to Excel to prepare an order, and the whole thing can be exported as a print-ready PDF in A4, Letter or square format, with selectable text and clickable links. Access can be limited to logged-in customers, or to customers who bought a specific product, so a wholesale price list stays out of public view.

Which way to start

Have a PDF already? Upload it and add hotspots; you can publish today. Starting from scratch, or tired of re-exporting a PDF every time a price changes? Build from products and let the flipbook update itself. Either way, a free plan is enough to try both.