The Merchant Engine compared with Zid
Zid is a hosted platform a merchant subscribes to, with a Jinja theme system, an app market and payment fees per transaction. The Merchant Engine is software you install on a server you or your client control, licensed per number of paid stores. If you are the merchant, Zid is the shorter road. If you are the developer who wants the code, this page is for you.
What Zid does better
Zid is an established Saudi platform with a partner ecosystem this project does not have: it publishes a merchant base in the thousands, a theme system with gettext localization and Arabic plural handling, an app market, and payment and shipping partners already connected. A merchant gets far more, faster, from Zid than from a self-hosted install. What this engine is behind on, stated here because the row set on this page has no place for it: its first public release is not tagged yet, no card gateway ships in it, and its admin interface is English and is not mirrored for right-to-left languages, so a merchant who administers a store in Arabic reads an English dashboard.
Row by row
Every claim about Zid was read from its own documentation on 2026-09-09 and carries the page it came from. Every claim about The Merchant Engine links the documentation page that proves it. If a row is wrong, it is a bug: write to bbadii@pm.me and it gets corrected.
| Criterion | Zid | The Merchant Engine |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A Saudi all-in-one ecommerce platform, operated by the vendor. “Zid is a Saudi holding company established in 2017, dedicated to revolutionizing the retail sector” Source: zid.sa | A self-hosted ecommerce platform: a REST API, an admin dashboard and a server-rendered storefront, installed together on your own server with one command. Read the page that proves it |
| Who it is sold to | Merchants are the customer, with a separate partners and developers track for people who build for them. “Thousands of stores need your touch in developing their websites and applications” Source: zid.sa | The developer or agency that builds and runs stores for merchants. The merchant is the person the developer hands the admin to. Read the page that proves it |
| Code and hosting | No self-hosting or platform source access is offered in the material read on this date. The vendor's open-source page covers utility libraries, not the platform. “These are projects we built and run in production at Zid, released for anyone to use” Source: opensource.zid.sa | You hold the source and run it on your own server or your client’s. Nothing about the store depends on a vendor staying online, and the licence check needs no network. Read the page that proves it |
| What a developer can change | Apps and themes built against the Merchant API, documented on the developer portal. “Use the Merchant API to make a request to the *Create a Webhook* endpoint” Source: docs.zid.sa | Every line. The API, the admin and the storefront are one repository you install from source, with recipes for adding an endpoint, a screen, a settings key, a payment provider or a storefront page. Read the page that proves it |
| Storefront customization | Themes are Jinja templates with settings schemas and assets, published for merchants to customize. “Developing a theme in Zid means combining Jinja templates, settings schemas, and assets to create a storefront experience that merchants can customize and publish.” Source: docs.zid.sa | Two ways, and both are yours: brand the shipped storefront from the admin (palette, fonts, logo, locales, money), or edit its Angular source, or replace it entirely against the documented REST contract. Read the page that proves it |
| What it costs to run | Plans read on 2026-09-09: Starter "Free Forever", Rise "99 SAR/month", Growth "299 SAR/month", Professional by quote. Payment fees are charged per transaction on top, for example 1% plus 1 SAR on Mada, excluding VAT. “99 SAR/month” Source: zid.sa | A yearly licence per number of paid stores, plus your own hosting. No subscription per store, no transaction fee, no percentage of sales, and no charge on a staging or demo store. Read the page that proves it |
| Data portability | Per-entity exports of orders, customers and products through the dashboard: the help centre says the order export extracts complete order data into a formatted file. No full-store export or migration-out document was found on this date. The help centre is in Arabic. “خاصية تصدير الطلبات تتيح لك استخراج بيانات الطلبات بالكامل في ملف منسق” Source: help.zid.sa | The database is yours: PostgreSQL on your box, dumped nightly by the installer’s own timer, restorable with a documented procedure. There is nothing to export from because nothing left. Read the page that proves it |
| Content languages | Theme text is translated with gettext, and the locale's own plural rules are applied, which is what Arabic needs. Whether one live store serves several languages at once is not stated on the pages read. “You don't hard-code grammar in your app; the locale's plural rules guide which `msgstr[index]` is chosen.” Source: docs.zid.sa | French, English and Arabic catalogues ship. A store enables the ones it serves and picks a default; every user-facing field holds one value per locale in one database. Read the page that proves it |
| Payments and cash on delivery | Payment gateways and banks connected through the platform, buy-now-pay-later providers named, and cash on delivery available as a checkout option: the Arabic help centre says it can be enabled within guest checkout. “بإمكانك تفعيل خيار الدفع عند الاستلام في خاصية الشراء كزائر” Source: help.zid.sa | Cash on delivery, manual bank transfer and gift cards ship and work, with no cap and no fee taken by anyone. No card gateway is in the first release; a local provider is written against the payment provider recipe. Read the page that proves it |
| Apps and marketplace | An app market developers publish to, which the page advertises as more than seven thousand merchants. The vendor's share of app revenue is not published; the thirty percent figure that turns up in searches belongs to a merchant-referral programme, not to app sales. “طوّر تطبيقك وانشره على سوق تطبيقات زد لأكثر من 7000 تاجر” Source: apps.zid.sa | None, by design. There is no app store to publish to and no revenue share, because an integration is code you add to a repository you already own. Read the page that proves it |
Which one to pick
Pick Zid when
- You are the merchant and want a store running without hiring a developer.
- You want Saudi payment and shipping partners connected for you.
- You would rather pay a monthly subscription and per-transaction fees than run a server.
- You are building an app for many merchants and want the app market as distribution.
- Your merchant administers the store in Arabic and wants the dashboard itself in Arabic and mirrored.
Pick The Merchant Engine when
- You build stores for clients and want one licensed stack instead of a subscription per store.
- No percentage of the client's sales should reach a platform vendor.
- The store's database has to sit on infrastructure you or your client control, with your own backups.
- You need to change the checkout or the API itself, not only the theme.
Questions
Is this cheaper than Zid?
It depends on the number of stores and their volume. A licence here covers a number of live stores for a year with no transaction fee; a Zid store pays a subscription plus a fee on each payment. Run your own numbers, including the server.
Can I move a Zid store here?
There is no importer. Orders, customers and products can be exported from Zid per entity and would be loaded through the admin API. That is real work and this page will not pretend otherwise.
Does this handle Arabic as well?
Arabic is one of the three catalogues the engine ships, the storefront mirrors right to left from the store configuration, and every field holds one value per locale. What it does not have is a Saudi ecosystem of local payment and delivery integrations.
See it for yourself
The fastest check on any row above is to run the thing: install it locally in one command, or read what an install puts on a box. The other comparisons are on the compare index.
Last updated . Every claim on this page is read from a published source and cited beside it.