How much does an e-commerce website cost in the UAE?

The build is the line on an online store's budget that you pay once. The lines that decide whether the store makes money are charged on every order: the payment fee, the delivery, and the parcels that come back. A quote that stops at the build has priced the easy part.

Should a UAE store use Shopify or a custom build?

Start on a hosted platform such as Shopify unless a specific requirement rules it out. A custom store is code that someone has to host, secure, update and fix for as long as you trade, while a hosted platform charges a subscription and takes those jobs away. Custom costs more to build and keeps costing more to run.

A custom build earns its price in four cases.

• A marketplace, where several sellers list on one site.
• Business-to-business selling, with contract prices, credit terms or approval steps for each buyer.
• Heavy two-way connection to a warehouse or ERP system that apps can't handle.
• Delivery or checkout rules a platform can't express, such as time slots by emirate with cut-off times.

If your requirements fit on one page and a platform's standard features plus a few apps cover every line, a custom build pays for flexibility you won't use. The post on whether Shopify works in the UAE covers the set-up questions, and the WordPress, Shopify or Webflow comparison covers the other options.

A first-year budget has twelve lines, not one

A first-year budget has twelve lines, and a build quote shows one or two of them. Several are charged on every order, and the table shows what decides each cost.

No gateway fee is printed here, because the rate depends on the contract you sign. Ask each provider to put five things in writing: the percentage by card type, any fixed fee per transaction, set-up and monthly fees, how many days pass before the money reaches your account, and what a refund or a chargeback costs.

The licence line is a question and not a figure. Ask the authority that issued your trade licence whether your activity allows selling online, because we couldn't verify the fee or the process for this guide.

Arabic multiplies the content far more than the code

Every product needs an Arabic title and description, and so do your size guides, policy pages, order emails and WhatsApp templates. A right-to-left theme is a one-off job, which makes the right-to-left layout the cheap part of Arabic.

Say a made-up store has 300 products and an Arabic description takes 20 minutes to write and check. That's 100 hours before the store opens, and it repeats for every product added later. Price it as its own line, or find out the supplier has left it to you.

A failed cash on delivery order costs the delivery twice

A failed cash-on-delivery order costs the delivery out and the delivery back, plus handling, with no sale to pay for either. Quiqup, a UAE delivery company, says a returned parcel means paying for logistics twice. It also says return-to-origin rates for many UAE merchants sit between 20% and 35%, against a realistic target of under 10%.

Checkout.com's 2025 report on digital commerce in the Middle East and North Africa says cash on delivery use in the UAE has fallen by 53% since 2020. That's a fall in use and not today's share of orders, so it says nothing about what your own customers will choose. Your first month of orders and your courier's data can.

The sum for one failure is the outbound delivery, plus the return delivery, plus handling. Multiply it by your failure rate and your order count to get the monthly bill. Quiqup's tactics for bringing the rate down are WhatsApp order confirmation, prepaid nudges and address validation, and each needs something built or configured, so put them in the brief. The posts on reducing failed cash on delivery orders and return to origin go through them.

Our website price is for a marketing site, not a store

Our published website price starts from AED 35,000 and is for a marketing site. A store with a catalogue, checkout and delivery rules is a different scope, so ask any supplier, us included, for a quote written against a brief and not against a page count.

Our help is most direct on the lines after the build. Our e-commerce marketing starts from AED 12,000 a month and scales with catalogue size and channel count. It covers store conversion work, speed and Arabic storefront correctness, and a margin model that counts cash-on-delivery failures and returns before it counts a sale as profit. The media itself is paid by you to the platforms.

Ask your courier for its return-to-origin rate on cash-on-delivery orders before you approve a build, and put that number into your margin sum. If it's near the range Quiqup describes, the checkout and confirmation design will matter more to your profit than the theme.