A leading German education provider connected its e-commerce and marketing automation platforms to synchronize customer, product, and order data in real time. The integration powers automated campaigns like abandoned cart recovery and back-in-stock alerts, improving conversion rates and operational efficiency.

The Challenge

Commerce and marketing systems worked in isolation, causing delays, inconsistent data, and missed engagement opportunities. Without an automated link, abandoned carts went unnoticed, product restocks weren’t communicated promptly, and customer records were often incomplete.

The goal: a single, real-time data flow that enables instant, relevant outreach and eliminates manual data transfers.

The Solution

Real-Time, Event-Driven Integration

We designed and delivered a fully decoupled, event-driven architecture using Adobe Developer App Builder, Adobe I/O Events, and the client’s marketing automation platform. The approach ensures that every significant event in the commerce environment — from a new order to a cart abandonment — is captured, enriched, and sent to marketing in near real time.

Adobe Commerce was configured to emit native events for key triggers, including order placements, product updates, stock changes, customer registrations, and cart abandonments. These events are published to Adobe I/O Runtime, a cloud-native event bus that guarantees reliable capture and queuing, even during high traffic peaks.

From there, a custom App Builder microservice processes each event, enriches it with additional details via Commerce APIs, validates the data, and securely pushes it into Marketo through REST APIs. This enables marketing workflows to act immediately — sending a cart reminder within minutes, updating product information for campaigns, or triggering a back-in-stock email to a targeted audience.

The system is completely decoupled: Adobe Commerce never waits on the marketing platform, and queued events process automatically when both systems are ready. This protects site performance, ensures upgrade safety, and provides a scalable foundation for future event types or integrations.

How we did it

From Blueprint to Live Operations

The project began with collaborative workshops to identify the highest-value event triggers and map the exact data requirements for marketing automation. We then enabled Adobe I/O Events for these triggers and built the App Builder microservice in Node.js, leveraging Adobe’s cloud infrastructure for auto-scaling and resilience.

For each event type, we implemented a transformation pipeline: extracting raw event payloads, enriching them with context from Commerce APIs (e.g., cart contents, seat availability for courses), and formatting them to fit Marketo’s API schema. Security and compliance were addressed from the start, with encrypted API credentials and GDPR-compliant handling of customer preferences.

Campaign alignment was equally critical. We worked with ADG’s marketing team to configure responsive workflows in Marketo that would immediately consume incoming data — from launching a nurture sequence when a new user registers, to suppressing promotions for a course a customer has just purchased.

Testing included simulating high-volume bursts, abandoned cart flows, and back-in-stock scenarios to validate reliability and speed. The phased rollout started with core data sync for products, customers, and orders, before layering in advanced triggers like abandoned carts and restock alerts. This ensured value was delivered quickly while allowing for iterative refinement.

About the Client

A leading German training and education institution specializing in the cooperative banking sector. The organization provides in-person and digital learning programs to thousands of professionals annually, combining academic expertise with deep industry knowledge to support continuous professional development.