Integrating Magento - Better to Integrate with Marketo or SFDC?

[Amy_Lepre1]

Hi,

We are getting ready to integrate our Magento store to our other business systems and I'm currently researching the pros and cons of which system to integrate with: Marketo or SFDC?

With the integration, we want to capture when people add items to the cart, abandon the cart, make a purchase, etc. When a sale happens we want to create a case in SFDC (we're using Service Cloud).

We're looking at Grazitti's Marketo-Magento integration and that looks promising, especially after discussing our particular use case with them. However I want to make sure I'm covering all my bases. I have read some threads on here about limitations of syncing Marketo custom objects to SFDC (which is what we will be doing if we use the Grazitti integration). If we went with a Magento-SFDC integration, would SFDC be able to capture the abandoned cart or store browsing activity and pass that to Marketo? I think the answer is no, but just wondered if others have experience in this area.

If you have this same tech stack with Magento, Marketo and SFDC, how did you integrate them? Any experience or feedback is welcomed.

Thanks!

[SanfordWhiteman]

I have read some threads on here about limitations of syncing Marketo custom objects to SFDC (which is what we will be doing...

You won't actually be doing this, since there's no such thing! Marketo Custom Objects do not natively "sync" to SFDC. SFDC Custom Objects, however, do natively sync to Marketo (to a special kind of mirrored CO in Marketo, not the same as a Marketo-only CO). That is thus the direction you should be working toward if you want to have a many-to-one CO schema this is reflected on both sides.

The only thing that could be considered Marketo COs syncing to SFDC COs is a totally custom integration tier that will be laughably prone to error/overload (especially in light of the fact that you can do it reliably in the other direction).

If we went with a Magento-SFDC integration, would SFDC be able to capture the abandoned cart or store browsing activity and pass that to Marketo? I think the answer is no, but just wondered if others have experience in this area.

Of course. And the answer is yes, not no. Starting from the SFDC side is the way to get this done.