El Catre — Cuba's First Independent E-Commerce Platform.
Challenge
El Catre set out to be Cuba's first independent e-commerce platform — a marketplace where small Cuban businesses could open storefronts, list products, run promotions, and accept payments. Building for Cuba meant working around US-embargo constraints on payment rails, designing for intermittent connectivity, and combining a social-commerce layer — real-time chat, push notifications, sharing — on top of a conventional cart and checkout.
Approach
I built the frontend in Nuxt 2 with Vue 2, Vuex, and Buefy on top of an Apollo GraphQL client talking to a Django + Graphene backend. Auth federated Firebase phone verification with Facebook/Google OAuth and JWT tokens issued by the backend. Real-time chat and live notifications ran over Django Channels via vue-native-websocket, push notifications went through OneSignal, and ApexCharts powered the seller analytics dashboards. PWA support and server-side rendering kept the app usable on slow connections.
Stack
Outcome
Launched a multi-tenant Cuban e-commerce platform with seller storefronts, product catalog, cart and checkout, real-time chat, analytics dashboards, and social commerce features. The platform is no longer active.
Key Contributions
- Nuxt 2 SSR frontend with Apollo GraphQL client and batched HTTP queries
- Seller storefronts, product catalog, orders, cart, and checkout flows
- Real-time chat and notifications over WebSockets (Django Channels + Redis backend)
- Federated auth — Firebase phone verification, Facebook and Google OAuth, JWT
- Push notifications via OneSignal and email integration via Mailchimp
- Seller analytics dashboards with ApexCharts; image cropping and QR code generation for product flows
- PWA + SSR optimization for Cuban network conditions
- Backend support on the Django + Graphene side as a secondary contributor (not the primary backend developer)