Never miss an update, or new iPaper feature.
Feature update
UX / Interface
Improvement

Introducing a new Highlight effect to link styles

Felix avatar
Shared by Felix • February 28, 2024

When your links are presented as clear calls to action, your visitors know, instinctively, where to click. However, often product images, or other elements and areas of your catalog are covered by link styles to make them clickable too, and these might not be instantly obvious to shoppers. The result is fewer links clicked.

To draw greater attention to link style calls to action that aren’t instinctive, and obvious, we’ve introduced an additional highlight effect to link style enrichments with a hover effect. This subtle effect allows you to draw attention to your CTAs by momentarily highlighting all links on a page upon loading.

How it works on existing enrichments

The new highlight effect will be automatically applied to all link style enrichments that have already hover effect applied. 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.

Existing enrichments without a hover effect will remain unaffected.

How it works on new enrichments

When you create new Enrichments with a hover effect, the highlight effect will automatically be applied to them. You are, however, always able to toggle off the additional highlight effect by unchecking the Highlight style box.

Improved functionality on mobile devices

With the new effect, we have also improved the functionality of hover effects, and specifically, how they load, on mobile devices.

Previously, animations loaded per spread, meaning that on mobile devices, where only one page is shown at a time, the Hover effect was only visible on the first of two pages. With this latest update, hover effects on links and enrichments load per page, meaning that your visitors get to experience them fully, on each page that they load.

You can read more about how to set hover, and highlight effects on your link styles, in our guide:

Flipbooks
UX / Interface
Promotional

Spread a little love with seasonal effects using Custom Scripting

Felix avatar
Shared by Felix • February 07, 2024

Late last year, we showed you how you can use Custom Scripting to add some seasonal flair to your Flipbooks, to create a more engaging browsing experience. With Valentine’s Day around the corner, and with many digital retailers preparing themed catalogs, we’d like to share another seasonal effect. We think you’ll love it:

You can find out how to implement the love-hearts effect in your Flipbooks using Custom Scripting in our guide, below:

Custom Scripting is available on all accounts, and with it, you can inject third-party scripts into your Flipbook: from custom tracking, to pop-ups and any custom effect or script you wish. Your imagination is the limit!

Direct Selling / Social Selling
Feature update
Shopability

Your shoppers can now check out to predefined numbers using Viber

Felix avatar
Shared by Felix • January 31, 2024

Giving your shoppers the ability to complete their purchases via their preferred messaging service is vital in delivering a superior catalog experience.

In our latest update, we’ve brought our Viber checkout option to parity with our WhatsApp checkout option, by allowing visitors to send their cart contents to a predefined number, like a local sales representative, or your business number.

Now, shoppers using your Viber checkout option will be able to:

  • Check out to a predefined number of your choosing, or
  • Check out to a number from their Viber contacts list.

How to set it up

To allow your shoppers to send their cart contents to a predefined number, all you need to do is enter the country code and recipient number in the checkout setup settings.

Now, when your customers check out using Viber, they won’t have to specify which number to send their cart contents!

To allow your customers the freedom to send their cart contents to a number from their Viber contact list, you simply leave the country code and recipient number fields blank in the setup.

Ready to offer your shoppers a Viber checkout, or update your existing setup? Read our Viber checkout guide, below:

Flipbooks
Product update
Shopability
Improvement

The redesigned checkout experience is coming to all Shop-enabled accounts

Felix avatar
Shared by Felix • January 08, 2024

We’ve got great news: we will begin gradually rolling out the redesigned checkout experience to all Shop-enabled accounts starting January 8, 2024.

With the positive feedback, we’ve received from customers already using the new checkout experience through Early Access, we’re confident it offers a much more inspiring, and informative view of your customers’ cart.

What can I expect?

The redesigned experience moves the cart from a peripheral sidebar, to a front-and-center modal that is space-efficient, allowing for seamless integration of product images balanced with headlines, descriptions, and quantity selectors. This allows your shoppers to easily review their cart contents.

The new cart experience has been designed to visually stand out, emphasizing the significance of the shopping cart in the user's journey.

This design choice eliminates the previous risk of the sidebar and catalog competing for user attention. The result is a more visually appealing and user-friendly interface:

The redesigned checkout is part of a larger overhaul of the Shop experience, and complements the new toast notifications customers see when they add a product to their cart. These notifications include the convenient option to quickly add multiple units of products to the cart.

When can I expect it?

We will begin a gradual rollout of the new checkout on January 8, 2024.

Until then, why not experience the redesigned cart yourself, in our live demo Flipbook:

Flipbooks
UX / Interface
Promotional

Add seasonal effects to your Flipbooks using Custom Scripting

Felix avatar
Shared by Felix • November 03, 2023

If your business publishes season-themed Flipbooks, or has business-critical sales periods in-line with popular holidays, you likely already create Flipbooks that cater specifically to these occasions. Often, this comes with designing a digital catalog with a specific look, involving custom images, products, and offers.

Did you know that you can also enhance your seasonal catalogs with fun, and immersive, on-screen effects through Custom Scripting?

That's right! Why not take a look at our seasonally-enhanced, Flipbooks, live:

With Custom Scripting, we’ve added a fun snowfall effect, and festive audio to our winter catalog, that visitors can toggle on.

In fact, we enjoyed our own demo so much, we’ve created a guide on how you can implement it on your own Flipbooks:

Happy holidays! ❄️

Flipbooks
New feature
Shopability
Feature update

A new product and checkout experience is coming to iPaper

Felix avatar
Shared by Felix • September 19, 2023

There are some exciting changes coming to iPaper: we’re creating a seamless transition between browsing and purchasing in iPaper Flipbooks. These changes aim to refine how products are presented in your digital catalogs’ cart, through:

Stage 1: A redesigned cart experience (Q1 2024)

We’re ushering in these changes with a revamped cart. This redesign will offer a more inspirational, and informative view of a customer’s cart, allowing for a seamless transition between browsing and purchasing.

Getting an overview of the products you’ve put in your cart, and finalizing your purchase is a key part, and often the culmination of your shopping journey. The redesigned cart feature is designed to put this in focus, by moving from the sidebar, to a dedicated cart modal. We’ve done this to make the cart more in line with established e-commerce design principles.

Additionally, this feature will inform visitors about when a product is added to the cart through informative toast-notifications, which include the ability to quickly add multiples of products to the cart.

Stage 2: Introducing the new Product concept (Q1 2024)

Complementing the redesigned cart, we’re also introducing a new concept to iPaper – the ‘Product’ feature – which will bring together all of a product’s specifications, including product images and variants, into an expanded product view modal.

Using Products, you’ll now be able to group different variants, including unique product images and descriptions, under a single product.

With the introduction of product images, we’re now able to enrich the cart experience further by including these in the cart, and the toasts that display when a product is added to it.

Experience the redesigned cart for yourself, live!

You can see, and interact with, the redesigned cart experience live in our demo Flipbooks:

What happens next?

We aim to deliver this new shopping experience across multiple stages, with the first being the launch, and testing, of the new cart concept including the new, modal-based layout.

Stage 1: A redesigned cart experience

  • We expect to roll out the new cart experience to everyone in early 2024.
  • Early Access will become available in November (read more below).

At present, it will not include the ability to display product thumbnails within the cart, or the introduction of the Product concept.

Stage 2: Introducing the Product concept

  • We expect Early Access to become available in Q1, 2024.
  • More information on how you can register your interest will follow.

Flipbooks
Feature update
Improvement

Sharing Flipbooks is about to get more intuitive

Felix avatar
Shared by Felix • August 22, 2023

When your visitors share your digital catalog with others, it’s a great way of increasing traffic to your Flipbook. We’re replacing the in-built Flipbook sharing function with the native sharing feature of users' mobile devices to make sharing easier.

Previously, our inbuilt sharing function allowed you to share easily to preset platforms, such as Facebook or Twitter with one click, but sharing to other platforms required users to copy, and paste the catalog link manually, which is neither quick, nor intuitive.

By using the same sharing function that is used to share all content on a mobile, we think that sharing your Flipbook, will become easier, and more intuitive for your visitors. Users will also be able to make full use of their sharing shortcuts via their device’s sharing function, meaning that they can share, quickly and easily, to all the usual platforms they are used to using.

Custom sharing interfaces now possible via API

If you prefer to have a greater control over how, and to what channels your Flipbook is shared, you also have the option to create a custom sharing solution for your Flipbook using our Frontend API.

As we transition to native sharing, our current sharing feature will be entirely replaced. iPaper customers who have integrated a custom interface via our Frontend API should prepare for these changes and modify their interface accordingly. The good news is that we've extended our API to facilitate exactly that!

For detailed technical documentation on our Frontend API, please refer to the complete guide available, here.

When will this happen?

iPaper will implement the new sharing feature on

October 2, 2023.

How will this affect me?

If you already use our sharing options for your Flipbooks, on October 2, 2023, these will cease to be active, and instead your Flipbook visitors will be able to share via the device’s native sharing settings.

If you already use a custom interface for your iPaper Flipbook, you will need to accommodate for creating custom share settings for your desktop visitors, via our API. The share button requires an HTTPS connection in order to present custom sharing options to desktop visitors. These will not trigger, nor be visible, for Flipbooks served over HTTP connections.

What do I need to do?

If you are using our in-built sharing options today, you do not need to take action.

If you are using a custom interface today, and require custom sharing options for your Flipbook, you will need to build these into your interface. You will also need to ensure that your Flipbook is served over an HTTPS connection.

You can read more on the different ways you'll be able to share your Flipbook after October 2, 2023, in our new guide, below:

Enterprise+ feature
Integration
Security
New feature

Enterprise+ accounts can integrate SSO solutions with iPaper

Felix avatar
Shared by Felix • May 16, 2023

If your organization is already using a Single Sign-On (SSO) service in order to control access to different areas of your business online, you can integrate your SSO solution with your iPaper Enterprise+ account!

Integrating your SSO solution with iPaper:

  • Unifies login processes across platforms, simplifying user access.
  • Reduces password management hassle.
  • Provides centralized control over iPaper account access, reinforcing security.

Best of all, setting up SSO with iPaper is easy – our setup guide takes the guesswork out of integrating:

Feature update
Integration
Flipbooks

Say hello to our JavaScript API v.3!

Felix avatar
Shared by Felix • April 11, 2023

Hi there,

We’ve just released our updated JavaScript (JS) API v.3!

If you're not already familiar with it, the JS API allows you to pass events to, and receive events from, the Flipbook viewer via JavaScript. In short, it enables direct communication between your iPaper Flipbooks, and your website.

This is beneficial when you:

  • Want to build a custom interface for your embedded catalogs.
  • Want to enable shopping from the catalog directly to your website basket.

Our latest version of the JS API introduces almost complete parity between what you can achieve via the API and the native iPaper interface.

💭 Wondering how you can use the JS API with your own Flipbooks?

Some of the functions that that can be accessed from the API v.3 include:

  • Open basket
  • Search for query X
  • Open the Table of Contents
  • Open Build a Flipbook
  • Get the total number of pages
  • Get the current page number(s)

🎉 But there’s even more!

With this new version, you can access all JS events from the custom scripting field in Flipbooks.

This means that your catalog no longer needs to be embedded for you to utilize JS API functionality—perfect, for example, if you would like to enable custom tracking functionality.

You can find full documentation of what you can achieve with our JS API over on our Technical Documentation page, below:

💡 If you're currently using JS API v.2

If you're already using the previous version of our JS API, you'll want to migrate over to the latest version.

v.3 comes with the added benefits of:

Migrating to v.3 is easy, when you use our migration guide to help you:

Automation
Feature update
Tracking & Statistics

eCommerce Statistics now available via Backend API

Felix avatar
Shared by Felix • March 21, 2023

If you’re familiar with using our Backend API, you’ll be happy to hear that we’ve expanded it with new Ecommerce API functions, available to all accounts with existing, Backend API access!

Ecommerce API functions include two calls that return all orders completed over the last 3 months.

  • GetFlipbookOrdersByType
    Returns all orders submitted from any Flipbook, via a specific checkout type.
  • GetLicenseOrdersByType
    Returns all orders submitted from any Flipbook in your account, via a specific checkout type.

If you’re already using our Backend API, please see our documentation below for how to use these Ecommerce API functions:

💡If you’re not using our Backend API, but are interested in learning more about how it can work for you, reach out to our Customer Care team via the messenger in the corner!