Building an online store for the UAE: payments, Arabic and GCC shipping set the price
Published UAE ranges for an online store run from AED 3,500 to AED 110,000. The payment gateway, the language direction and the shipping rules explain most of that spread, and most briefs name none of them.
Muhammad Ilyas · Co-founder and CEO
Payments, checkout or subscription billing appear in 213 of the 2,397 project briefs we analysed from June to August 2026, 8.9 percent of them. Shopify is named in 145 and WordPress, WooCommerce or Elementor in 316. Selling online is ordinary work. What is not ordinary is the list of things a store in the UAE has to do that a store elsewhere does not, and that list is exactly where quotes stop agreeing with each other.
Why the published ranges are so wide
UAE agency pricing guides gathered for our own research put a basic online shop at AED 3,500 to AED 20,000 and up, and ecommerce with a payment gateway, inventory and logistics APIs at AED 8,000 to AED 110,000. A spread that wide is not noise. It is the distance between a catalogue with a checkout attached and a store wired into the systems that actually fulfil the order.
| Store type | Published UAE range | Where the money goes |
|---|---|---|
| Basic online shop | AED 3,500 to 20,000+ | Theme setup, catalogue entry, a standard checkout |
| Ecommerce with gateway, inventory and logistics | AED 8,000 to 110,000 | Integrations, stock and order logic, testing |
We publish our own tiers on each emirate's web development page for the same reason: so a brief arrives already knowing which end of the range it belongs at, rather than finding out on the third call.
The three requirements UAE briefs keep naming
Our archive of public project briefs holds 27,057 posts. Only 76 of them, 0.28 percent, mention Dubai, the UAE, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah or the Emirates, which mostly tells you UAE buyers do not source this work through open bidding. The UAE briefs that do appear are unusually consistent about what they need:
- A UAE-supported payment gateway, named as a hard requirement rather than left for later.
- Arabic and right-to-left builds, including right-to-left Shopify stores.
- GCC ecommerce with split orders and region-specific shipping rules.
- WhatsApp as a primary customer channel, sometimes with the specialist specified as Dubai-based.
Every one of those is a cost driver, and none of them is in a generic ecommerce template quote. If your brief leaves them out, each agency fills the gap with its own assumption, and you get five numbers that cannot be compared.
Choose the payment gateway before the platform
The gateway is the decision most stores make last and should make first. It decides which currencies you settle in, which cards and wallets you can accept, how refunds and partial refunds work, and which platforms it supports natively. A gateway with a maintained integration for your platform is a configuration task. A gateway without one is a development project, and on hosted platforms it can limit which checkout you are allowed to use at all.
Merchant onboarding is not instant either. Gateways run their own checks on the business and its trade licence before they settle funds, so starting that process during the build rather than the week before launch is the cheapest schedule protection available.
If you plan to offer cash on delivery alongside cards, say so up front. It changes how orders are confirmed, how failed deliveries are handled and when stock is released, and it should never be a discovery in week six.
Arabic is a second storefront, not a translation
Right-to-left is a layout commitment. The interface mirrors: navigation, breadcrumbs, carousels, arrows, the position of the price against the add to cart button. Product names, SKUs, sizes and prices drop left-to-right characters into right-to-left sentences, and that mixed-direction text is where most broken Arabic storefronts break. The Arabic typeface needs to stay legible at small sizes on a phone, which is where most of the traffic will be.
On Shopify, right-to-left support depends on the theme, and every app you add, from reviews to upsells to size guides, brings its own widget that may or may not respect the page direction. That is why right-to-left Shopify turns up by name in UAE briefs. It is a QA pass across every template and every app, not a language setting.
For search, the Arabic store needs its own URLs, paired with the English ones through hreflang, and product copy written for how Arabic-speaking customers actually search, not a machine pass over the English descriptions.
GCC shipping and split orders
A store that ships inside one emirate from one stock location is simple. Most growing UAE stores do not stay that store for long. Selling across the GCC means rates, duties and delivery promises that differ by country, and baskets that hold items from two warehouses or two suppliers. The UAE briefs we see ask for split orders and region-specific shipping by name.
Split orders reach into everything downstream: how the customer is charged, how many tracking numbers they receive, what happens when half the order comes back, and how stock is reserved across locations. Platform defaults rarely handle all of that cleanly, so it is app configuration at best and custom logic at worst. Either way it belongs in the written scope.
The costs that arrive after launch
Our research puts hosting for a UAE site at AED 200 to AED 1,500 a year and maintenance at AED 100 to AED 500 a month. A store then adds its own recurring lines: the platform subscription on hosted platforms, app subscriptions, the gateway's per-transaction fees, and messaging costs if order updates go out on WhatsApp.
On that last one, order and delivery updates are utility messages under Meta's per-message pricing, which cost a fraction of what marketing templates cost. Keep them free of offers, because a promotion added to a shipping update can reclassify it as marketing.
What to put in an ecommerce brief
- 1The payment gateway, or your shortlist, and whether cash on delivery will be offered.
- 2Whether Arabic means translated copy or a full right-to-left storefront, and who writes the Arabic product content.
- 3Which countries you ship to, from how many stock locations, and whether one basket can be fulfilled from more than one.
- 4The catalogue size and who supplies product photography and descriptions. Content scope is the most common reason a Dubai web project overruns its quote.
- 5Every system the store has to talk to, by name: inventory or ERP, accounting, CRM, courier, WhatsApp.
Five lines, and the quotes that come back will be describing the same store. That is the only condition under which comparing them means anything.
Questions
Published UAE agency ranges put a basic online shop at AED 3,500 to AED 20,000 and up, and ecommerce with a payment gateway, inventory and logistics integrations at AED 8,000 to AED 110,000. Where a project lands depends mostly on the gateway, the Arabic scope and the shipping rules, not the page count.
It can, but support depends on the theme, and each app you install adds its own widgets that may not respect the page direction. Treat a right-to-left Shopify store as a QA job across every template and app, and make sure the quote says so.
One that settles in the currency you need, accepts the cards and wallets your customers use, and has a maintained integration for the platform you are building on. Decide it before the platform, and start merchant onboarding during the build, because the gateway's checks on your business take time.
Yes, but per-country shipping rates, duties and delivery promises, plus orders split across stock locations, all need to be scoped. Platform defaults rarely cover split orders cleanly, so name them in the brief.
