Projects / Mobile / E-Commerce

House of Soap Mobile Application

A cross-platform mobile commerce application developed for House of Soap using Flutter, supported by a custom C# ASP.NET Core backend. The backend acts as a secure bridge between the mobile application and multiple regional WooCommerce websites, communicating through WordPress REST APIs while keeping privileged credentials securely on the server. A React administration dashboard provides centralized management of regional application configuration.

Year
Role: Full-Stack Developer
Category: Mobile / E-Commerce
Stack: FlutterDartReactJavaScriptC#.NETPostgreSQLPostGISWooCommerceWordPress REST APIREST APIsDockerLinux VPS

The problem

House of Soap operated separate WooCommerce stores across multiple regional subdomains and needed a single mobile application capable of connecting users to the correct regional source of truth. Connecting Flutter directly to WooCommerce would also have exposed privileged API credentials inside distributable client code.

The solution

Designed a custom ASP.NET Core integration layer that securely stores WooCommerce and WordPress API credentials and acts as the communication bridge between the Flutter application and the regional stores. PostgreSQL, PostGIS and geographic information are used to determine the appropriate region and route requests to the correct WooCommerce source.

Challenges

The primary challenge was creating a single mobile experience on top of multiple independent WooCommerce stores while securely handling privileged API credentials and reliably directing each user to the correct regional data source.

Outcome

Delivered a unified mobile commerce platform that securely integrates with multiple regional WooCommerce stores while keeping sensitive credentials server-side and centralizing regional routing and configuration behind a custom backend.

My contribution

Developed the cross-platform customer mobile application using Flutter
Designed and built the ASP.NET Core backend connecting the mobile application to WooCommerce
Integrated WordPress and WooCommerce REST APIs for transferring commerce data to the mobile application
Kept privileged WooCommerce and WordPress credentials exclusively on the backend instead of embedding them in the Flutter client
Built a React administration dashboard for managing regional configuration
Implemented support for multiple regional WooCommerce subdomains through a centralized backend
Integrated PostgreSQL and PostGIS for geographic and region-aware application logic
Containerized the application infrastructure with Docker and deployed it to a custom VPS
Configured, secured and managed the production Linux server environment from scratch

Engineering decisions

Introduced a backend-for-frontend layer instead of allowing the Flutter client to communicate with privileged WooCommerce APIs directly
Stored API secrets exclusively on the server to prevent credentials from being exposed through reverse engineering of the mobile application
Used the custom .NET backend as a routing and integration layer across multiple regional WooCommerce installations
Used PostgreSQL and PostGIS to support geographic and region-aware routing
Kept each regional WooCommerce instance as the source of truth for its respective market
Containerized application services with Docker and operated them on a self-managed Linux VPS