A book your customer builds, page by page
Composerie lets your Shopify store sell photo books that customers put together themselves. They add pages, place their own photos, and see the book take shape before they buy it.
30-day free trial. Cancel anytime.
What the customer actually does
They open your product page and get a book, not a form. They upload their photos, drop them onto pages, and move through the book spread by spread. Work in progress saves as they go, so a customer can close the tab halfway through a wedding album and pick it up later without losing the pages they already filled.
- Photos upload straight into the book
- Pages are filled one spread at a time
- Progress saves while they build
How long is the book?
You decide, per product. Set the smallest book you are willing to print, the largest you can bind, and the step in between, because most binding methods only work in multiples. A saddle-stitched booklet moves in fours; a layflat album might move in twos. Customers add and remove pages inside the range you set, and the price follows.
- A minimum, a maximum and a step, set per product
- Up to 200 pages
- Customers stay inside the range you allow
How it gets bound
The binding belongs to the product, not to the customer. Pick the one your printer actually offers and the book is built for it from the first page: hardcover, softcover, saddle stitch, spiral or wire-o. Each carries different margins and different page-count rules, which is exactly why the page range sits next to it.
- Hardcover and softcover
- Saddle stitch for thin booklets
- Spiral and wire-o for books that lie flat
What you set up first
A book product needs two things before a customer can touch it: a cover template and at least one interior template. The cover is where your title, spine and back sit. The interior templates are the layouts a customer's photos drop into, so a book with three interior templates gives them three kinds of spread to work with. Composerie will not let a book product publish to customers until that coverage is there, which stops half-built products reaching your storefront.
- One cover template
- One or more interior page templates
- Publication is refused until both exist
What about calendars?
Half of it works today, and it is worth being precise about which half. You can author a calendar yourself, month by month, and sell it as a fixed product that customers personalize in Linked mode. What you cannot do yet is hand a customer an empty calendar and let them build their own from scratch, because a calendar is not a photo book with twelve pages and Composerie refuses to pretend otherwise. If you try to publish a calendar into the full-page builder, it tells you so instead of shipping something half-right.
- Merchant-authored calendars work in Linked mode
- A customer-built calendar is not available yet
- The publication check says so rather than guessing
Questions, answered
How many pages can a photo book have?
Up to 200. You set the real limits per product though, because your printer's limits matter more than ours: a minimum, a maximum, and the step between them. Customers add and remove pages inside that range and the price moves with the count.
Which bindings can I sell?
Hardcover, softcover, saddle stitch, spiral and wire-o. You choose one per product rather than letting the customer pick, because the binding decides the page-count rules and the margins the pages have to respect.
Do customers lose their work if they leave the page?
No. A book in progress saves while they build, so a customer who gets halfway through a fifty-page album and closes the tab still has those pages when they come back. Long products need that; nobody finishes an album in one sitting.
Can customers build their own calendar?
Not yet, and Composerie says so rather than approximating it. You can author a calendar month by month and sell it as a fixed product that customers personalize in Linked mode. Handing a customer an empty calendar to build from scratch is not supported, so a full-page calendar publication is refused instead of shipping something that only half works.
What do I need before a book product goes live?
A cover template and at least one interior template. Until both exist, Composerie refuses to publish the product to customers, which is deliberate: a book with no interior layout is a product a customer cannot actually finish.
Works together with
Put a book in your catalog
Build one cover, one interior layout, and let customers fill the rest.
30-day free trial. Cancel anytime.