A store earns its money in three places: whether the catalogue can be searched, whether the checkout accepts what Saudi shoppers actually pay with, and whether the order that follows can be picked, shipped and invoiced without someone retyping it. We build stores that hold in all three — on Salla, Zid, Shopify or a custom stack, in Arabic and English.
The visible part is the storefront: category and product pages, search and filtering, the cart and the checkout. The part that decides whether the business works is behind it — how stock is kept accurate, how a paid order reaches the person who packs it, how a shipping label and a tax invoice are produced, and what happens when a customer wants to return something. A store that only solves the front half turns every sale into manual work.
Checkout is where Saudi stores lose the most avoidable revenue. Shoppers here expect mada alongside Visa and Mastercard, Apple Pay on iPhone, deferred payment through providers such as Tabby and Tamara, and in many categories cash on delivery. Each one you leave out removes a slice of buyers rather than pushing them onto another method — and a checkout that asks for a long form before showing the total loses people regardless of what it accepts.
Then there is the invoice. If you are VAT-registered, the sales your store issues fall under ZATCA e-invoicing, and the practical question is not whether but through which system: the platform you sell on, an accredited provider, or your own ERP. ZATCA has been onboarding businesses into the integration phase in waves set by revenue, so which wave you sit in determines your dates — the notice you receive is the authority, not a blog post. We build the store so the invoice is produced by whichever system you have decided owns it, once, with the QR and the sequence intact.
The Arabic storefront needs to be a storefront, not a translated one. Right-to-left changes more than text alignment: the direction of carousels and progress steps, where the price sits relative to the currency, how filters and breadcrumbs read, how a mixed Arabic-and-Latin product name behaves on one line, and how numerals are formatted. We build the Arabic side as a first-class layout and test it with real product data, because placeholder text hides every one of those problems.
Salla, Zid, Shopify, WooCommerce or a custom headless build — chosen against your catalogue size, margin, integrations and team, then built properly rather than themed. We say what each choice costs you later, not only today.
mada, Visa and Mastercard, Apple Pay, deferred payment through Tabby or Tamara, and cash on delivery where your categories need it — wired, tested with live transactions and reconciled against what actually settles in the bank.
Variants, bundles, stock rules and a search that copes with Arabic — plurals, missing diacritics, Latin brand names typed in Arabic letters. Plus the category structure and filters that let a large catalogue be navigated rather than scrolled.
Carrier integration for label creation and tracking, delivery options and rates by city, order routing to the branch or warehouse that holds the stock, and a returns flow the customer can start without phoning anyone.
One system owns the tax invoice — the platform, an accredited provider or your ERP — and the store feeds it cleanly so every order produces one compliant invoice with the QR intact, instead of two half-invoices from two systems.
Core Web Vitals held on a real phone on a mobile connection, product and category pages built to rank in both languages with correct hreflang, and conversion tracking wired once so ad platforms and analytics agree on what a sale is.
We map the catalogue, the payment and shipping methods you need, the systems the store must talk to, and who will run it day to day. Out of that comes a platform recommendation with the trade-offs written down — including the cases where a Saudi platform beats a custom build outright.
Category, product, cart and checkout designed against your real catalogue in both languages — long Arabic product names, missing images, out-of-stock variants — because those are the states a template demo never shows.
Storefront, checkout, payment methods, carriers, invoicing and any ERP or accounting link — each integration tested with live transactions rather than sandbox keys alone, and reconciled end to end before launch.
Products, customers, orders and — critically — the old URLs, redirected one to one so the rankings and the links you already have survive the move. We launch to a checklist and watch the first days of real orders closely.
Once real orders are flowing we work the numbers that move revenue: where the funnel leaks, which payment method is failing silently, which categories deserve content, and what page speed is costing on a mobile connection.
It depends on where your complexity sits. Salla and Zid are built for this market, so mada, local carriers, Arabic support and ZATCA-side tooling come as part of the platform — for a straightforward retail catalogue that is the fastest route to trading and the cheapest to run. Shopify earns its place when you need a deep app ecosystem or sell across borders. A custom build is worth it when the store is not really a store — configurable products, contract pricing per customer, a bill of materials, tight coupling to an ERP — because that is where platform limits turn into permanent workarounds. We recommend one and write down what it costs you in year three, not only in month one.
mada first — it is the domestic debit network and a large share of cards in the Kingdom are on it, so a checkout that only takes credit cards is turning away buyers who have the money in the account. Then Apple Pay, which removes the whole card-entry step on iPhone; Visa and Mastercard; deferred payment through providers such as Tabby or Tamara, which measurably matters on higher basket values; and cash on delivery, which is still expected in several categories even though it costs you in failed deliveries. We wire what suits your basket sizes and margins, test each with live transactions, and reconcile against what actually settles — a method that appears at checkout but fails silently on one card type is worse than not offering it.
If your business is VAT-registered in Saudi Arabia, the sales your store makes are taxable supplies and fall under the e-invoicing rules like any other channel — an online sale is not a special case. Retail sales to consumers are simplified tax invoices, which carry the QR code the buyer can scan. The part that varies is the integration phase: ZATCA has been onboarding taxpayers in waves defined by revenue, and your own notification sets your dates, so treat that letter as the authority. Practically, the decision we help you make is which system issues the invoice — the platform, an accredited solution provider, or your ERP — and then we make sure only that one does, because two systems each issuing their own version is the failure we are called in to unpick.
That is a planned part of the job, not a hope. Before anything moves we crawl the live store and export every indexed URL with its traffic, then map each one to its destination — product to product, category to category — and ship permanent redirects one to one. Blanket-redirecting everything to the homepage is the single most damaging shortcut here. We also carry over titles, descriptions, structured data and the Arabic and English URL pairs with their hreflang, keep the old sitemap available during changeover, and watch Search Console daily for the first weeks. Expect some movement in the first month; what we plan against is the drop that does not come back.
A clean catalogue on a Saudi platform typically runs six to ten weeks; a custom build or one with an ERP integration runs longer, and we phase it so you are trading before every feature is finished. The schedule almost never slips on development. It slips on product data — photography, Arabic and English names and descriptions, variants, weights and dimensions for shipping — and on merchant account approvals, which are on the payment providers’ timelines, not ours. So what we need from you early is the catalogue in whatever state it is in and the person who can chase the payment paperwork. We will tell you at the start which items are on your side of the line.
Book a short call and we will come back with a clear plan and a realistic budget — in Arabic or English.
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