The hotspotting function works by hijacking clickable links in a flipbook PDF, extracting the item number from the link, and using that item number to find the right product. The link will be a URL of some kind.
If you want to make it easy to enter the hotspot URLs, use the following pattern: ecat://product/<itemnumber>. E.g. for product 81134AN, enter ecat://product/81134AN
If you want to make it possible to use the same PDF on the web, you can use the following pattern: https://supercat.supercatsolutions.com/vcg/m/1/product_by_number/81134AN. If/when eCat Online is set up, tapping hotspots with this format will take the user to the eCat Online page for that product. Tapping in eCat will hijack the URL and use the normal flipbook function.
eCat uses pattern matching to extract the item number from the URL. It will match anything ending with product/itemnumber or product_by_number/itemnumber, so you could even use a URL like https://www.visualcomfort.com/product/81134AN or https://www.visualcomfort.com/product_by_number/81134AN.
For the programmers: we use a regular expression to extract the URL: product(?:_by_number)?/(.*)$