Catalogs, Ecommerce, How-ToHow to Add Buy Now Links to Your Digital Catalog

By: Robert Soares     |     Feb 15, 2026

A catalog without buy links is a lookbook. Pretty, maybe. Useful for browsing. But when a customer sees something they want, they have to leave the catalog, go to your website, search for the product, and hope they find the right one.

Most of them won't bother.

Buy links close that gap. Customer sees the product, taps the button, lands on the product page ready to purchase. One click between interest and action. And the data is clear on this: Baymard Institute's ecommerce research consistently finds that checkout friction is one of the top drivers of cart abandonment. Every extra step you add between "I want this" and "I bought this" costs you conversions.

Jared Spool, who founded UIE and co-founded the design school Center Centre, has spent years telling people how expensive one step can get. A large retailer forced shoppers to register before they could buy anything. His team pulled the Register button out and dropped a Continue button in its place, and he wrote up what happened: "The number of customers purchasing went up by 45%. The extra purchases resulted in an extra $15 million the first month. For the first year, the site saw an additional $300,000,000." One button, sitting between wanting and buying.

This guide covers how to add buy links to a digital catalog, where to put them, how to structure the URLs, and how to track what's working.

What Is a Shoppable Catalog?

A shoppable catalog is a product catalog where every item has a clickable link to its purchase page. The buyer browses the catalog like a magazine, flipping through pages, scanning products, zooming in on photos. But instead of copying a product name and searching for it on your website, they tap it and go straight there.

The experience should feel like browsing a physical catalog with a salesperson standing next to you. Point at something, and the salesperson immediately hands it to you. That's what a buy link does digitally.

This isn't new technology. It's a link on a page. What makes it work in catalog format is the context: buyers are already in a browsing mindset, already looking at products, already considering what to order. The buy link shows up at the exact moment of interest.

How Do You Actually Add Buy Links?

The process is straightforward in any flipbook editor. Here's how it works in Flipbooker.

Step 1: Have Your Product URLs Ready

Before you touch the editor, make a list of every product in your catalog and its corresponding URL on your ecommerce platform. A simple spreadsheet works:

This prep work takes 20-30 minutes for a 50-product catalog. Tedious, yes. But it makes the actual linking process much faster because you're not hunting for URLs while you're editing.

Step 2: Open the Editor and Select the Link Tool

In the Flipbooker editor, grab the link tool from the toolbar. It's the chain icon. Click it, then draw a rectangle over the product image, the product name, or a "Buy Now" button you designed into your PDF.

You're defining a clickable zone. The editor doesn't care what's underneath it. You're just saying "when someone clicks inside this rectangle, take them somewhere."

Step 3: Paste the Product URL

A popup asks for the destination. Paste the product URL from your spreadsheet. Save. That's one product done.

Step 4: Repeat for Every Product

Work through your catalog page by page. For a 50-product catalog, this takes about 30-45 minutes. For larger catalogs, budget an hour or two. It's repetitive, but it's the kind of work you do once and it pays off every time someone clicks.

Step 5: Test on Desktop and Mobile

Open the published catalog. Click every link. Make sure each one lands on the correct product page. Then do the same thing on your phone. Tap every link. If any feel too small to hit with a thumb, go back and make the clickable area larger.

Where Should Buy Links Go on the Page?

Placement matters more than most people realize. A buy link in the wrong spot gets ignored. The same link in the right spot gets clicked.

On Product Images

The most natural placement. Buyers look at images first. If tapping the image takes them to the product page, that matches their instinct. They see it, they tap it, they get more info.

The downside is discoverability. Buyers might not realize the image is tappable unless you give them a visual hint. A small cart icon overlay in the corner of the image works well. So does a subtle "Tap to buy" label.

Below Product Descriptions

After scanning the image and reading the name and price, the buyer's eye naturally moves downward. A "Buy Now" or "Order" button sitting just below the price catches them at the decision point.

This is the most predictable placement and the one most ecommerce catalogs use.

As Designed Buttons in the PDF

If you're designing your catalog pages in InDesign or Canva, you can build the buttons right into the design. A colored rectangle with "Shop Now" text, matching your brand colors, sitting next to each product.

Then in the flipbook editor, you just draw the clickable zone over the pre-designed button. The visual button handles discoverability. The clickable zone handles the interaction. They look professional and they work.

Structuring Your Product URLs

The URL you link to makes a difference for both buyer experience and your analytics.

Direct Product Pages

The simplest approach. Link straight to the product page on your ecommerce site.

https://yourstore.com/products/model-500-drill

The buyer clicks, lands on the product page, sees full details, and can add to cart. Clean, fast, no confusion.

Cart-Add URLs

Some ecommerce platforms support URLs that add a product directly to the cart. On Shopify, for example:

https://yourstore.com/cart/add?id=PRODUCT_ID&quantity=1

This skips the product page entirely. Click, item's in the cart, done. Aggressive but effective for products where the catalog already provided all the information the buyer needs.

Use this for reorder items, consumables, or products where buyers already know exactly what they want.

URLs with UTM Parameters

Add UTM tracking to every product URL so you can measure catalog performance in your ecommerce analytics.

https://yourstore.com/products/model-500-drill?utm_source=catalog&utm_medium=flipbook&utm_campaign=spring-2026

This tells Google Analytics (or whatever you use) that the visitor came from your catalog. You can see how much revenue your catalog generates, which products get the most catalog-driven sales, and how catalog traffic compares to other channels.

If you have multiple catalogs, use different campaign names for each. "spring-2026-catalog" vs. "clearance-2026-catalog" lets you compare performance across editions.

Making It Work on Mobile

A lot of your catalog traffic will come from phones. A buy link that's awkward to tap on a small screen is a buy link that doesn't get tapped.

The mobile experience comes down to three things.

Tap target size. A link that's 20 pixels wide is nearly impossible to hit with a finger. Make every clickable area at least 44x44 pixels, and test on a real phone. If you find yourself aiming carefully to tap a product, it's too small.

Page layout. Catalog pages designed for print often have tiny product grids that look great on paper and terrible on a phone screen. If your catalog will be viewed on mobile (it will), design with that in mind. Fewer products per page, larger images, and bigger text mean more pages, but each page actually works.

Loading speed. A catalog with fifty high-resolution product photos on a single spread might take forever to load on a cellular connection. Flipbooker handles this with tiered image loading, thumbnails first, full resolution on zoom, but your original images should still be optimized. Nobody taps a buy link if the page hasn't finished loading.

For a deeper look at adding interactive elements, check out our guide on adding links and videos to your flipbook.

Tracking What Works

Adding buy links without tracking them is like running ads without analytics. You're spending effort but you can't tell what's paying off.

In-Catalog Analytics

Flipbooker shows you which links get clicked, how often, and on which pages. This tells you:

• Which products generate the most interest
• Which pages drive the most clicks
• Where buyers drop off without clicking anything

If page 12 gets 500 views but zero link clicks, something's wrong with that page. Maybe the products aren't relevant. Maybe the buy link isn't visible. Maybe the page design is confusing. The data points you toward the problem.

Ecommerce Analytics

With UTM parameters on your product URLs, your ecommerce platform tracks the rest of the journey. How many catalog visitors added to cart? How many purchased? What was the average order value from catalog traffic versus other channels?

This is the data that proves your catalog's ROI. "Our spring catalog drove $47,000 in trackable revenue" is a much better story than "we published a catalog and things seem fine."

Connecting the Dots

The full picture looks like this:

1. 10,000 people viewed the catalog (flipbook analytics)
2. 1,200 clicked buy links (flipbook analytics)
3. 340 added to cart (ecommerce analytics)
4. 180 completed a purchase (ecommerce analytics)
5. Total catalog-attributed revenue: $27,000 (ecommerce analytics)

That's a 1.8% view-to-purchase rate and a clear ROI you can take to your boss.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Linking to your homepage instead of the product page. Every buy link should go to the specific product. Sending someone to your homepage and hoping they find the product is the digital equivalent of handing someone a map when they asked for directions to a specific building.

Using generic link text. "Click Here" doesn't tell the buyer what happens. "Buy Now," "Order This," "Add to Cart," or "Get a Quote" are all better because they set expectations.

Forgetting to update links when products change. If you discontinue a product, the buy link shouldn't go to a 404 page. Either remove the product from the catalog or redirect the link to a replacement. Dead links erode trust fast.

Making links invisible. A clickable zone with no visual indicator is a hidden link. Buyers can't click what they don't know exists. Add a visual cue: a button, an icon, a color change. Something.

Getting Started

Pick your five best-selling products. Add buy links to each one in your existing catalog. Publish, share with your team, and test. If those five links work well, add the rest.

You don't need to make your entire catalog shoppable in one sitting. Start with the products that already sell and give them a faster path from the catalog to the cart. Then expand from there.

Build your shoppable catalog with the Flipbooker editor, or explore examples on the catalog use case page.