AlHoot × Hulul
ALHOOT Store

AlHoot × Hulul

Moving AlHoot Store onto software built for the market it sells in.

Prepared by Hulul Group for AlHoot Store

We built the store you're running today

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.

Since 2021, we have spent 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.

Three things AlHoot cannot do today

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.

AlHoot cannot take money online.

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.

AlHoot cannot know a customer after they buy.

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.

AlHoot cannot know where the stock is.

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

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.

This isn't a test subject. It's the same platform already running live storefronts today:

PartnerCatalogueStorefront
Jolt 418 products jolt-iraq.com
Lalangi 557 products lalangi.com
Wisam Beauty 3,220 products wisam.beauty
وميض الذهب 912 products wameed.app
EuroPack 88 products europack.alziebaq.iq

Key highlights

  • Phone-first accountsA number and a one-time code. No email, ever.
  • Online paymentsVisa and Mastercard supported today, with more providers in development.
  • Stock that keeps a recordPer variant, per location, on a permanent ledger.
  • Delivery, governorate by governorateCourier rates, windows, and cash reconciled in the system.
  • WhatsApp as infrastructureOrder updates fired from the order record itself.
  • Dynamic Meta catalogueA live product feed your ad campaigns can point at.

Your customer, unblocked

The phone number is the account.

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.

And they can pay.

HululOS supports online payment through Visa and Mastercard today, with additional payment providers currently in development.

  • Visa
  • Mastercard
  • Cash on delivery
  • Bank transfer
  • Store credit
  • Gift card

Card payments are processed by our payment partner and subject to their terms and conditions.

Additional providers can be introduced as their integrations become production-ready.

And the address works.

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.

A storefront worthy of the brands you carry

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.

Nike Columbia CR7 Dunlop Ellesse Everlast Jason Markk Lunera New Era OVS
Adidas ALDO Body Sculpture Reebok Spalding Speedo Timberland Under Armour Vans
Cinematic concept of a premium sportswear storefront with teal lighting
Concept image: one product on a plinth, its colourways fanning out as glowing cards connected back to it
New in this build

A live catalogue for your ads

  1. Problem

    The ads point at pages, not products. A boot that sold out this morning keeps buying impressions all afternoon.

  2. Solution

    One live feed of every product, colourway, price and stock state, straight from the database that runs the store. Meta reads it continuously — Instagram tagging and the WhatsApp catalogue included.

  3. Delivery

    Connected to Commerce Manager during the build and validated before launch. It ships with the storefront.

Inventory that survives an audit

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.

Catalogue depth

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.

Concept showing one football boot in navy-teal and sand-navy colourways

Delivery and cash, the way Iraq actually runs

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.

Cinematic concept of a Baghdad courier handing a retail parcel to a customer

That last piece is currently a notebook. It shouldn't be.

WhatsApp, owned

AlHoot already sells on WhatsApp — from someone's personal phone. When that person leaves, the conversations leave with them.

The channel isn't yours.

The annual package includes a real WhatsApp Business API account, wired into HululOS, so the order states message the customer themselves:

Order confirmed Dispatched Out for delivery Delivered Cash collected

Plus a cash-on-delivery reminder on delivery morning — fewer wasted trips — and a verified business account, which counts for something in a market with a counterfeit problem.

Worth saying up front: Meta bills per conversation, in USD, on usage — and verification is Meta's process, not ours. We handle both during setup.

Side by side

WixHululOS
Online payment providerLimited locallyVisa and Mastercard supported
Checkout without an email addressNot possiblePhone + one-time code
Iraqi address format (governorate → landmark)NoNative, 18 governorates
Delivery rates per governorate and courierNoYes
Cash-on-delivery reconciliationNoYes
Stock locationsOneUnlimited
Stock movement historyNoneFull ledger
Low-stock alertsNot nativePer variant + store-wide
Media per product1655+, plus video
Separate media per colour variantNoYes
"Brand" as a real entityNoYes
Arabic and Kurdish contentAdd-onNative, field level
Access to your own dataNo exportFull export, anytime — migration-ready

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.

What it costs

Complete commerce package

$1,400 / year

Migration to HululOS, a new custom storefront, and setup of your WhatsApp API account — with platform hosting, Arabic support in your timezone, and ongoing development included.

The WhatsApp Business API plan set out earlier and the dynamic Meta catalogue are both inside this package. Meta's own per-conversation charges are billed on usage.

Optional standalone offer

$2,200 one-time

Mobile app

A dedicated AlHoot mobile app, offered separately from the annual commerce package.

The annual package is the complete move away from Wix: the migration, the storefront, the HululOS platform, and the WhatsApp API account are delivered as one offer.

The mobile app is a separate, standalone project. It is not required to launch the new storefront and is not included in the $1,400 annual package.

What we're not claiming

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.

Migration is our problem, not yours

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.

  • The existing store stays up and selling until the new one is verified.
  • Every existing URL is mapped, so the search ranking AlHoot has spent years earning transfers instead of evaporating.
  • Once the new Hulul store is complete and verified, cutover can be initiated immediately with virtually no interruption.
  • If day one goes wrong, the old store is still there.

Timeline: The complete migration process, through launch, takes three weeks.

What we're proposing

The move begins with AlHoot's agreement and a clear financial settlement.

Ready in three weeks.

We'll migrate the full catalogue into HululOS, build the storefront, and switch on phone checkout, online payment and WhatsApp support.

The existing Wix store stays live while we build and verify the new store. Once it is ready, cutover can begin immediately.

To start, we need: AlHoot's initial agreement and a discussion to settle the remaining value in its current annual billing window before the new yearly agreement begins.

Questions you're probably asking

Can't we just install an app for that?

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.

You told us Wix was right last time. Why trust you now?

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.

What happens to our search ranking?

A full URL map and redirects, built during the migration and verified before cutover.

Who owns the data?

AlHoot. It's your data, with a full export path and an API — the opposite of the position you're in now.

What if we want to leave you later?

You take your data with you. We're happy to put that in writing.

Who supports us, and when?

Support is available during Hulul's working hours through any official Hulul channel, or directly through Abdurahman or Omran.