Hal Leonard Flip Dealer Program Integration

Overview

Hal Leonard is a music publishing and distribution company.

AIMStorefront has Hal Leonard's FLIP (Full-Line Internet Program) integration built in. FLIP allows shoppers to transfer the contents of a consumer's shopping cart from the Hal Leonard Online web site directly to an AIM store.

FLIP Requests

When a storefront signs up with FLIP, they open themselves to accepting an HTTP GET request, a URL, which contains a list of items being transferred.

The list of items is split into numbers and quantities that are double-delimited by carets (^) and pipes (|).

• Each item number and quantity pair is delimited from the next by a caret sign (^).
• The item number and quantity for each item is then delimited by a vertical bar (|), with the item number as the left-side argument and the quantity on the right.

Example

Assume Joe's Music Shop is a FLIP dealer and is set up to receive the contents of the Hal Leonard shopping cart. John is browsing the Hal Leonard Online web site and searches for items by the Beatles. After browsing his search results and adding items into the cart, he then clicks the "Complete Order Now" link from the Hal Leonard shopping cart. John then chooses Joe's Music Shop from the list of participating FLIP dealers. The Hal Leonard web site sends the list of items on the URL that Joe's Music Shop provided as part of their FLIP dealer registration.

The URL Hal Leonard sends to Joe's Music Shop may look something like this:

• http://www.joesmusicshop.com/AeHLCartImport.aspx?items=374413|1^3562|2^35622298|4

In the above example, three items were transferred to Joe's Music Shop with the following quantities:

SKU       Quantity
374413       1
3562         2
35622298     4

But

The product SKUs it searches for in AIMStorefront must have a format like the following:

SKU     Quantity   AIMStorefront SKU
374413     1         1001-00374413
3562       2         1001-00003562
35622298   4         1001-35622298

The SKU is prefixed with "1001-" and padded on the left with 0 so the total length is 13 characters.

If this doesn't match a SKU in the Product Table, nothing will be added to the cart for that SKU.

The length of the entire link plus the item numbers can not be more than 1024 characters. If the resulting link with the item numbers and quantities exceeds 1024 characters, the link will be truncated at 1024. This is a limitation on the Hal Leonard side.

Implementation Details

• The FLIP integration is accessible from {yourAIMStorefront}.com/AeHLCartImport.aspx.
• It works similar to WSI in that it's a page set up specifically to receive HTTP GET requests.
• After receiving a request, AIMStorefront checks the list of products against the Product table using the SKUs and adds any products it finds to the shopper's cart.
• The shopper is redirected to the shopping cart page {yourAIMStorefront}.com/shoppingcart.aspx with any Hal Leonard products the integration was able to successfully add.