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Understanding cart item flattening

Cart item flattening is a process consisting in splitting each cart item whose quantity is greater than 1 into individual cart items.

Talon.One always flattens the cart items you send. This allows you and Talon.One to apply per-item effects to units of a given product, instead of only considering all the units of a given product.

For example, if you run a clothing company and a customer adds two T-shirts and three hats to their cart, Talon.One will flatten the cart items internally:

Non-flattened cart items vs. flattened cart items.
note

Per-item discounts are applied to each instance of the item. Using per-item effects, can lead to more triggered effects.

JSON representation of the flattening​

Use the Update customer session endpoint to share the details of a session, and its cart items, to Talon.One.

Cart items are represented by the CartItems array inside the payload, for example, if a customer adds 3 units of a given item to their cart, you send the following payload to Talon.One:

Your payload
{
  "customerSession": {
    "profileId": "URNGV8294NV",
    // ...
    "state": "open",
    "cartItems": [
      {
        "name": "Candle",
        "sku": "SKU1241028",
        "quantity": 3,
        "price": 15.99,
      }
    ]
}

Such cart is flattened internally by Talon.One to look as follows:

Internal version of your payload
{
  "customerSession": {
    "profileId": "URNGV8294NV",
    // ...
    "state": "open",
    "cartItems": [
      {
        "name": "Candle",
        "sku": "SKU1241028",
        "quantity": 1,
        "price": 15.99,
      },
      {
        "name": "Candle",
        "sku": "SKU1241028",
        "quantity": 1,
        "price": 15.99,
      },
      {
        "name": "Candle",
        "sku": "SKU1241028",
        "quantity": 1,
        "price": 15.99,
      },
    ]
}

As a result, if you use per-item effects, like a per-item discount applied to all items of the session, you receive three effects instead of one.