Hooli

Lead Developer & Co-Founder · E-Commerce

Co-founded one of the Dominican Republic's leading electronics e-commerce platforms: WooCommerce at scale, local bank financing, and a custom two-way Zoho sync.

Overview

Hooli imports and sells premium technology in the Dominican Republic: Apple, Sony, Nintendo, Lenovo, Yamaha, Dell. As co-founder and lead developer I owned the platform end to end, from architecture to daily technology decisions, while we scaled the company to nine employees. The build ran deep. A WooCommerce platform with dynamic pricing and custom plugins; integrations with local bank financing including AZUL (Banco Popular) and Botón de Pago (Banco BHD León) plus our own direct financing feature; a custom two-way Zoho sync plugin keeping inventory, invoices, and CRM in real time across sales channels; SMS flows through Twilio and MessageBird; and tax-compliant receipts. Cloudflare Enterprise guarded the storefront against scraping and malicious traffic, with Varnish caching keeping pages fast on Rackspace. The SEO work put us at the top of the Dominican market for major electronics keywords, and the platform ran with high uptime until my exit in 2022. Building and running your own store changes how you build for clients: you stop shipping features and start shipping outcomes.

Technical highlights

  • WooCommerce with dynamic pricing and custom plugins.
  • Local payment integrations: AZUL, Botón de Pago, and a direct financing feature.
  • Custom two-way Zoho sync for inventory, invoicing, and CRM.
  • Twilio and MessageBird messaging flows.
  • Cloudflare Enterprise security with Varnish caching on Rackspace.
  • SEO strategy that ranked top for major electronics keywords in the Dominican Republic.

What shipped

  • Scaled the company to 9 employees, maintaining robust eCommerce features and high uptime
  • Spearheaded a multi-faceted tech stack encompassing web, cloud, and internal process automation
  • Integrated multiple local bank financing solutions for streamlined payments
  • Developed custom two-way Zoho sync for inventory and CRM management
  • Implemented tax receipt generation for government reporting
  • Achieved top SEO rankings for electronics keywords in Dominican Republic
  • Created dynamic pricing system synced with US retailers
  • Implemented enterprise-level security with Cloudflare to protect against threats and scraping

Stack

WordPress, WooCommerce, PHP, MySQL, Twilio, Zoho Books, Zoho Mail, Custom Plugins, Custom Payment Gateways, Messagebird, Tax Receipts, Rackspace, Varnish, Dynamic Pricing, Cloudflare Enterprise

Screens

Hooli screenshotHooli screenshot