I’m Badii Boutar. I build online stores for clients, a lot of them in the Gulf, and I built The Merchant Engine, an open-source store you run on your own server. So I’m not neutral here. Even so, for most people opening their first shop in the UAE, Shopify is a sensible place to start, and most of this post is about how it actually works there.
I read every Shopify page quoted below on 29 October 2026. Prices change, so check the live pages before you decide anything.
What the plans cost
Shopify has a pricing page for the UAE. The plan prices are in US dollars. The card fees are in dirhams.
- Basic: $24 a month paid yearly, or $32 paid month to month.
- Grow: $69 a month yearly, or $92 monthly.
- Advanced: $299 a month yearly, or $399 monthly.
- Plus: from $2,300 a month.
The dirham is pegged to the dollar at 3.6725, so Basic on a yearly plan comes to about AED 88 a month.
What each order costs
This part depends on how the customer pays.
If you use Shopify Payments, Shopify’s own card processing, the UAE page lists card rates from 2.9% + AED 1.00 on Basic, from 2.8% + AED 1.00 on Grow, from 2.7% + AED 1.00 on Advanced and from 2.5% + AED 1.00 on Plus. Note the “from”. It is the lowest rate, so a given card can cost more. On a AED 300 order paid by card on Basic, the lowest rate comes to AED 8.70 plus AED 1.00, so AED 9.70.
If you use a different card provider instead, Shopify adds its own fee on top of whatever that provider charges: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus. On the same AED 300 order on Basic, that is AED 6 to Shopify before the provider takes its share.
Shopify Payments is available in the UAE. That page covers cards and accelerated checkouts, and says you may need to verify personal and business information when you set it up. It’s worth doing early, because a few things on the pricing page are marked as requiring Shopify Payments: the built-in fraud analysis, selling in local currencies, and local payment methods.
Cash on delivery
In my client work in the Gulf, cash on delivery is the payment method almost every shop turns on first.
On Shopify, cash on delivery is a manual payment. Shopify’s manual payments page lists cash on delivery as one of the common types, and says “You aren’t charged third-party transaction fees for manual payments.” So a cash order costs you the plan and nothing more on the Shopify side.
The cost that remains is the courier’s. Collecting cash is a service, and couriers charge for it in different ways. Ask yours what it charges per cash order and how long it holds the money before it pays you, because that delay is your cash flow.
I wrote more about how cash on delivery compares across the two platforms in my post on an open-source Shopify alternative, so I won’t repeat it here.
Arabic and right to left
This is where Shopify has moved the most lately.
Every plan on the UAE pricing page includes translating your storefront. Shopify’s Translate & Adapt app added auto-translation for Arabic in March 2024. Then, on 2 October 2026, Shopify’s changelog announced “improved support for 3 right-to-left languages (Arabic, Urdu, and Hebrew)” in the admin and in storefronts, which the same post says covers checkout, customer accounts and the Horizon family of themes.
That is a real improvement, and it’s recent. If you looked at Shopify a year ago and walked away because of Arabic, it’s worth a second look. What I would still check on a trial store is the theme you actually plan to use, the apps you add on top of it, and whether everything still reads well in Arabic on a phone. An app built without right to left in mind can still break a layout that the theme gets right.
VAT
VAT is the same whichever platform you choose, so it’s worth knowing before you set prices. I’m not a tax adviser, and this is only the headline. According to the Federal Tax Authority and the UAE government portal, the standard rate has been 5% since 1 January 2018. You must register once your taxable supplies pass AED 375,000 over the last twelve months, or are expected to pass it in the next thirty days, and you can register voluntarily from AED 187,500. Registration is due within thirty days. A business not resident in the UAE has to register whatever its sales, unless someone else in the UAE is responsible for the tax.
The part that touches your store directly is how prices are shown. When VAT came in, the Federal Tax Authority told businesses to display prices with VAT included, so the price a shopper sees on the product page should be the price they pay.
When a self-hosted store makes more sense
This is where The Merchant Engine fits for a UAE shop, and where it doesn’t.
Stripe is its only card provider so far. Cash on delivery, manual bank transfer and gift cards need no credentials, and since v1.0.1 a shopper can pay by card once you enter the Stripe keys in the admin. The recipe for adding another provider is written, but if you need a local UAE card provider on launch day, use Shopify. That alone rules it out for some stores.
It also means running a server. Someone has to install it, update it and back it up. A Shopify plan includes all of that, and it is a big part of what the monthly price pays for.
Where it fits is a shop that sells mainly on cash on delivery and wants the store in Arabic from the start. The storefront, the invoices and the emails work in Arabic, right to left. The installer asks for the currency, how prices are written, the VAT rate and whether prices include tax, and cash on delivery is switched on by default. After the install, payment methods and tax zones are edited in the admin. There is no plan fee and no fee per order, because the code is MIT-licensed and the store runs on a server you pay for directly.
One limit to know: the admin dashboard is in English. Every text field has an Arabic tab that types right to left, but the dashboard itself is not translated or mirrored. If the person running the shop day to day needs an Arabic admin, that matters.
The full list of what ships and what doesn’t is on What you get.
What I’d do
If you’re starting out and want to sell this month, open a Shopify trial on Basic, set up Shopify Payments, add cash on delivery as a manual payment, and test the Arabic storefront on your phone with the theme you plan to keep.
If your orders are mostly cash, you want the store and the code to be yours, and you or someone you trust can look after a server, The Merchant Engine is worth an afternoon. Requirements is the place to start.