Animal Base
Building a High-Performance Media and Commerce Marketplace for Animal Base
Industry
E-Commerce, Health & Wellness, Retail
- Development
Overview
Animal Base is a health and wellness startup on a mission to make true vitality easier to find and act on. To support this goal, Modern.tech developed a centralized digital ecosystem composed of three distinct parts. The first is a curated marketplace built with custom Shopify infrastructure and powered by Shopify Collective, bridging the gap between suppliers and consumers. The second is a curated Knowledge Base designed for the rapid publication of research, news, and media (e.g., video or podcast content). Finally, we created a Thought Leader Directory that integrates directly with the Instagram API to provide live education and discovery.
The Challenge
Animal Base needed to centralize highly vetted products without the overhead of traditional warehousing or inventory management. The team required a seamless blend of media and commerce to ensure every purchase was supported by scientific education, which manifisted into three unique challenges:
• Technical Integration: Standard Shopify setups are not designed to manage the "Media + Education + Marketplace" triangle.
• Live Data Syncing: The project required pulling live data from Meta and Instagram to keep the Thought Leader Directory updated without manual entry.
• Shipping Logistics: We had to design a unique solution to solve the conversion friction caused by Shopify Collective, where integration with multiple suppliers resulted in multiple shipments from different locations.
The Approach and Platform Stack
Modern.tech used a strategy involving Shopify Hydrogen to maintain backend stability while delivering a fully custom frontend experience. The frontend was built on top of Shopify, fully customizing the out-of-the-box solutions that Shopify provides. By then integrating the marketplace infrastructure with Shopify Collective, we enabled the Animal Base team full freedom to add and manage suppliers and their product base. There were three key system integrations necessary to make this project successful:
• E-commerce: We utilized Shopify Collective to fully enable and end-to-end supplier connection, built alongside custom shopify integration to make the browsing and purchasing process seamless.
• API Integration: We used the Instagram and Meta APIs to display live "Thought Leader" counts and recent reels. This enabled live follower counts and rankings for experts and influencers. On the inner pages this also enabled the team to pull in the latest instagram content for each influencer, with no additional effort.
• Marketing: The stack includes Klaviyo integration to enable email and marketing workflows and a streamlined customer and order support system. On top of that, we built custom integrations with Refersion to enable their affiliate marketing program—from application to approval.
Deep-Dive: Marketplace Architecture and UX
Supplier Marketplace Design
While Shopify Collective connects the stores, Modern.tech built the tools required to scale. We developed custom page templates to automatically render Brand Pages, Product Display Pages (PDP’s), and more. These pages display specific products, unique shipping policies, and inventory data that remain consistent with supplier expectations, and crucial to customer acquisition and achieving revenue at scale.
Solving Multi-Vendor Shipping Friction
In a Collective model, shipping is a major hurdle because each supplier has their own unique shipping rules and free shipping thresholds. This means customers are required to pay shipping for multiple different suppliers unless a threshold is met, and, in absence of a solution, customers wouldn’t discover this until checkout.
The Solution: We designed a custom Shipping UI located directly in the cart flyout aimed at increased transparency, and reduced conversion friction.
Dynamic Thresholds: The UI flags exactly how much more a customer needs to spend to hit “Free Shipping” for each specific brand. This happens before the customer proceeds to checkout to increase the likelihood of conversion for multi-brand baskets by encouraging customer to tailor their purchasing behavior—rewarding intentional shopping.
The Knowledge Base and Education Directory
We built custom components for a centralized scientific database. This allows the team to publish research and host podcasts or social feeds instantly, supporting their mission of making truth easier to find.
In constructing the Thought Leader Directory we used live API calls to refresh follower counts and recent content so users always see the most relevant experts, supporting content and educational discovery. The construction of the Thought Leader Directory allows intentionally ranks Animal Base’s list of experts and influencers by follower count, essentially gamifying popularity.
The Result
Launch
Animal Base launched with 14 suppliers, over 120 products, and more than 100 research articles. The business is now fully operational, and has entered growth mode. This technical foundation allows the client to pivot away from platform management and focus entirely on brand scaling and social media marketing—selling more than just the “idea” of Animal Base.
Future Roadmap
Modern.tech continues to serve as Animal Base’s development partner post-launch. The architecture is prepared for the next phase of growth, which will include AI-driven feature integration and a custom mobile app to further connect scientific education with consumer action, and meeting their customers where they live.
