Background
Social Native's mission is to connect brands with creators to create authentic social content, enabling them to build communities of ambassadors and influencers to share their brand stories and grow their businesses.
Branded Content is their startup idea to provide a marketplace platform to make discovery, communication, and transactions between buyers and creators more efficient and frictionless.
Challenges
- Building a marketplace poses some more challenges than a typical eCommerce, which in this case included payment integrations, collecting social media follower information, and an integrated chat system for buyers and creators.
- Effectively leveraging and configuring the commercetools API and platform to meet Social Native's specific needs and requirements.
- Orchestrating dynamic requirements and responding to quick changes in a startup environment, all while collaborating with an overseas client design team and maintaining an Agile workflow with a large in-house developer team.
Easy profile and offer creation
The Branded Content platform streamlines brand collaborations for influencers and ambassadors. They can easily create profiles, manage their collabs, and define packages with clear offer details, minimizing confusion for buyers.
The creator dashboard allows users to review all relevant information, readily available for easy management of their content creation work.
A comprehensive buyer experience
A user-friendly interface for buyers allows users to search and browse by creators or by the type of content, channel, or industry they are interested in. This makes it easy for brands big and small to find suitable creators that match their budget and expectations.
Additionally, the platform combines marketplace, communication, transactions, and content review and feedback in one place, making influencer management much easier for brand PR teams.
Communication is the heart of the marketplace
Key functionalities for a high-performing marketplace are chat and communication services. We leveraged the power of TalkJS to craft a smooth and seamless chat experience, which facilitates communication but also ensures brands and influencers are engaged and well-informed throughout their cooperation.
To enhance this further, we integrated email notifications via SendGrid at multiple stages of the collaboration process. By doing so, we guarantee that everyone stays connected and up to date on agreements, feedback, and approvals.
Faster implementation with commercetools
We advised on and chose commercetools in our backend solution due to its robust and flexible SaaS platform, which provided numerous integration points to enable customization and integration with external services. We were able to create an API Gateway with FrameworkX, built on reactPHP, to simplify communication between the custom frontend and commercetools, while also implementing several microservices to support customization and integration.
The utilization of FrameworkX introduced asynchronicity and potential for higher performance into PHP applications, ultimately reducing the time to market and cost of the project. Overall, we enjoyed the challenge of leveraging commercetools' capabilities to structure our architecture and tailor it to the unique requirements of this project.
© 2025 Snowdog
