Moving AlHoot Store onto software built for the market it sells in.
Let's start with the honest part.
We chose Wix for AlHoot. We were Wix partners, we built the store, we set it up, and we onboarded your team onto it. At the time it was the right call, and it did its job — it took AlHoot online and kept it there.
Then we spent the next to be agreed years running into the same walls with you. Not design problems. Structural ones — payments, customers, stock. Every one of them ended the same way: Wix can't do that here.
So we stopped waiting for Wix to care about Iraq, and built our own platform instead.
This document is about what that platform does, what it costs, and how AlHoot moves onto it.
These aren't settings someone forgot to switch on. They're properties of the platform, and we know because we tried to solve all three inside Wix.
Wix Payments isn't offered in Iraq, and there is no Wix integration for ZainCash, FIB, Qi Card, FastPay or NassPay. What's left is "manual payment" — a checkbox that marks the order unpaid and leaves the collecting to you.
Wix requires an email address to complete an order, because email is how Wix identifies a customer. It cannot be turned off. Most Iraqi shoppers don't have one they use, so they either abandon the checkout or invent an address on the spot. Either way AlHoot loses the sale, or loses the ability to ever reach that customer again.
Wix holds one stock number per product. No locations, no history, no record of who changed what. AlHoot holds the same shoe in nine sizes across more than one place.
None of this is a complaint about Wix. It's a global platform doing exactly what it was built to do. Iraq simply isn't in it.
HululOS is a commerce engine we own outright — every line of it — built for this market first rather than translated into it. Arabic-first, phone-first, IQD-first, cash-first.
That ownership is the entire argument.
Nothing in this proposal depends on another company's roadmap or regional priorities. When AlHoot needs something, it becomes a feature — not a support ticket to a company in another timezone that has never heard of Karkh and Rusafa.
You already know how we work when something breaks the night before a sale. That doesn't change. What changes is that now we can actually fix it.
A customer signs in with their phone and a one-time code — that is the entire login. No email, ever. They track the order over WhatsApp and reorder in one tap.
Which means every row in AlHoot's customer list is a real, reachable person. Abandoned-cart recovery, back-in-stock alerts and win-back campaigns arrive somewhere instead of bouncing.
Ten methods are built into the platform, including the five Iraqi rails Wix has never supported:
AlHoot switches on whichever it wants.
Iraq has no functioning postal system — people navigate by governorate, then district, then the shop on the corner. So that's the form:
Governorate → City → Area → Street → Building → Nearest landmark → Notes
All 18 governorates are built in, in Arabic, English and Kurdish. Your driver gets an address a human being can actually find.
AlHoot resells nineteen international brands, each of which spends a fortune on how it looks. A template storefront quietly tells the customer that AlHoot is smaller than the brands on its shelves.
Nike and Adidas don't sell through a template. Neither should their biggest reseller in Iraq.
We design and build yours from scratch — custom motion and shaders, product flows built around how people actually buy sportswear, brand pages that feel like brand pages, and full control of the tracking underneath so your ad spend optimises on real data.
Arabic-first and right-to-left by default, not translated afterwards. Arabic, English and Kurdish, down to the individual product name and description.
أشهر البراندات في محيط واحد
That sentence is AlHoot's whole proposition. In Wix, "brand" isn't an entity — we faked it with tags and collections, and you've seen the result. No true brand pages. No brand-level merchandising. No brand reporting. No filter that combines brand with category and size cleanly. The one idea the business is built on had nowhere to live.
In HululOS, brands and a properly nested category tree are first-class objects.
Nike → Football → Firm Ground, size 42, in stock in Baghdad
— one page, one URL worth ranking, one number you can report on. And a product can sit in several categories at once, so a running shoe lives under Running, under Men, and under its brand without being duplicated three times.
Wix gives you one stock quantity and no locations — no branch, no warehouse, no separation.
HululOS tracks stock per variant, per location, and separates available from reserved, so units sitting in an unpaid cash-on-delivery order don't get sold a second time.
Underneath sits a permanent ledger. Every movement is a row: the type — receipt, adjustment, stock in, stock out — the quantity before, the quantity after, which order caused it, and which member of staff did it. Nothing is ever overwritten.
That is the difference between we think we have four and being able to prove where all four went.
Wix caps a product at 16 media items. HululOS products in production today carry more than fifty, plus video.
But the cap isn't the real point. On HululOS, media attaches to the variant, not just the product. The red colourway has its own gallery; the black colourway has its own. The customer taps a colour and the photographs change with it.
On a catalogue where every product is a size-and-colour grid, that is the difference between a page that sells and a page that generates a WhatsApp message asking what the thing actually looks like.
Underneath: unlimited variants, each with its own SKU, barcode, cost price, compare-at price, weight and discount. Barcode scanning, CSV bulk import, and Smart Import that pulls a complete product in from a supplier's page.
On storage — which matters at AlHoot's catalogue size — adding photographs is not a billing event. Your plan is sized for your catalogue up front. Nobody is metering your media, and nobody is moving you up a tier because you photographed a shoe properly.
Wix shipping is country, region and weight. Iraq is delivered governorate by governorate at governorate-specific rates, often split inside Baghdad, by local couriers with no Wix presence.
HululOS holds a rate table per delivery company, down to governorate, city and area, with the expected delivery window for each zone. You register your couriers and your drivers, assign orders to them, and — the part every platform forgets — reconcile the cash-on-delivery takings when the driver comes back, inside the system, against the orders.
That last piece is currently a notebook. It shouldn't be.
| Capability | Wix | HululOS |
|---|---|---|
| Iraqi payment rails (ZainCash, FIB, Qi Card, FastPay, NassPay) | None | 5, built in |
| Checkout without an email address | Not possible | Phone + one-time code |
| Iraqi address format (governorate → landmark) | No | Native, 18 governorates |
| Delivery rates per governorate and courier | No | Yes |
| Cash-on-delivery reconciliation | No | Yes |
| Stock locations | One | Unlimited |
| Stock movement history | None | Full ledger |
| Low-stock alerts | Not native | Per variant + store-wide |
| Media per product | 16 | 55+, plus video |
| Separate media per colour variant | No | Yes |
| "Brand" as a real entity | No | Yes |
| Arabic and Kurdish content | Add-on | Native, field level |
| Access to your own data | No export | It's your database |
That last row is the one to sit with. On Wix there is no site export — we know, because we tried. Every order, customer and photograph AlHoot creates from today onward makes it more expensive to ever change platform. That cost compounds quietly, every day.
Platform, hosting, support in Arabic in your timezone, and ongoing development — included, not quoted separately each time.
Migration off Wix, and your storefront built from scratch.
That annual figure is roughly what AlHoot already pays to run on Wix, once the plan, the paid apps patching the gaps, and separately-quoted custom work are added together.
So the comparison isn't cheaper-versus-dearer. It's the same money for software that does the three things Wix structurally cannot — and a team that answers the phone in Arabic.
The one-off 500,000 covers migrating everything off Wix and building the storefront. A custom storefront is normally the entire project fee on its own. Here it's the smaller of the two lines.
Three things Wix genuinely does better than us:
Wix's app marketplace is vastly larger. Thousands of third-party apps, for almost anything. Ours is a fraction of that — the difference is that the things AlHoot actually needs are in the platform rather than bought separately.
Wix has thousands of ready-made templates. You can change the entire look of a Wix site in an afternoon. With us, design is a project with a timeline.
Wix is a company of thousands. We are not. We're a smaller team, and you should weigh that honestly — against the fact that you can reach the people who wrote the code.
You'd rather hear this from us now than discover it in month three. And you already know we tell you when something won't work — that's how this conversation started.
Normally the migration is the most frightening part of a proposal, because a new vendor is guessing at what's inside the old system.
We're not guessing. We built it.
We know how every product, category and customer record in that store is structured, because we structured them.
We take a full, current snapshot out of Wix — products, variants, images, categories, customers, order history — and load it into HululOS. The tooling for this already exists and has been used before; it isn't something we'll be working out on AlHoot's live store.
Timeline: discovery to be agreed → design to be agreed → build to be agreed → migration to be agreed → launch.
Don't take any of this on faith, and don't sign anything today.
Give us one brand.
We'll migrate that catalogue into HululOS, build the storefront, switch on phone checkout and ZainCash, and stand it next to what you have now — to be agreed weeks.
Then you compare real numbers: conversion, abandonment, and how long it takes your team to add a product. Not two documents.
We asked AlHoot to trust our judgement on a platform once before. This time you don't have to. You can just look at the two of them side by side.
To start, we need: to be agreed
Not for these. There is no Wix app for the Iraqi payment rails. Email-free checkout is Wix's identity model, not a feature that can be added. And no app can give a platform a data structure it doesn't have — which is what stock locations and movement history are.
Because last time we were recommending someone else's product and hoping it would stretch far enough. This time we're accountable for the software itself. If it doesn't do what AlHoot needs, there's nobody for us to point at.
A full URL map and redirects, built during the migration and verified before cutover.
AlHoot. It's a PostgreSQL database with an export path and an API — the opposite of the position you're in now.
You take your database with you. We're happy to put that in writing.
to be agreed