Dubai · Web Development
Shopify development in Dubai — a storefront you own, on a platform you rent.
You finish with a theme in your own repository, the Shopify account in your name, and the catalogue, gateway and delivery rules wired to how the business actually runs. If the platform cannot do something, you hear it during scoping rather than after launch.
- Theme code in your repository
- Your Shopify account from day one
- UAE gateways, Arabic and RTL
What's included
Six things a Shopify build actually leaves you with.
Not a list of platform features — Shopify supplies those to everyone. This is the part decided by a person, and the part you are paying for.
A theme written, not bought
A Liquid theme built from your design as sections and blocks your team can rearrange in the theme editor without touching code. No purchased theme with a logo dropped into it, and no page-builder app layered over the editor Shopify already gives you.
A catalogue that is modelled, not uploaded
Products, variants, options, collections and metafields decided as a data model before anything is imported. It is cheap to change on day one and expensive on the day the catalogue is full, and it sets the ceiling on what filtering, search and reporting can ever do.
UAE payments, cash on delivery included
Gateway selection and wiring — Telr, PayTabs or Network International, with Tabby or Tamara where instalments matter and Apple Pay for the phone. Cash on delivery is configured properly rather than bolted on, because UAE customers still expect it at checkout.
Shipping, tax and markets configured
Delivery zones and rates for the emirates you actually serve, the courier your operations team already uses, tax set at the UAE rate, and market settings if you sell outside the country. Dull work, and the source of most support tickets in a store's first month.
Apps and integrations, chosen sparingly
Every app is a monthly subscription and usually a script running on your storefront, so each one has to earn its place. Where the store has to talk to an ERP, an accounting system or a courier, that connection is built and watched rather than left to a plugin nobody owns.
Migration, with the redirect map first
Catalogue, customer records and order history moved off WooCommerce, Magento or something a developer wrote years ago — and every old URL mapped to its Shopify equivalent before DNS changes, because the platform's URL structure changes them whether you plan for it or not.
Who it's for
Three stores this fits, and one it does not.
If the checkout itself has to follow rules the platform will not permit, the honest answer is a store on your own stack — and we would rather say that before a proposal than halfway through one.
A brand that has outgrown its theme
The store works, but the last few things you asked for came back as limitations rather than quotes. Usually it is the theme that is the ceiling and not the platform, which means a theme built around the catalogue you actually have removes the ceiling without moving the business anywhere.
Your last three requests all came back as “the theme cannot do that”.
A store moving onto Shopify
You are leaving WooCommerce, Magento or a custom build, and the catalogue, the customer records and the order history all have to arrive intact. The risk is rarely the products. It is the addresses they used to live at, and how much of your search traffic is attached to them.
Nobody can tell you what happens to your current product URLs.
A store the operations team works around
Orders are re-typed into an accounting system, stock is corrected by hand and the courier receives a spreadsheet. The storefront is not the problem; the wiring behind it is. That is usually a smaller project than the redesign people assume they need before they ask.
Someone copies each order into a second system every morning.
How we deliver it
Five stages, and the platform's limits are found in the first one.
Each stage ends in something you can open — a document, a store you can log into, or an order you can place yourself.
01
Scope against the platform
What the store has to do, checked against what Shopify permits before there is a price attached to it. Anything the platform will not do goes into the scope as a written constraint — including, occasionally, the conclusion that Shopify is the wrong place for this store.
02
Catalogue and data model
Products, variants, options, collections, metafields, tax and delivery zones agreed as a structure rather than improvised during upload. On a migration this is also where the export is cleaned, which is the least glamorous stage of the project and the one that decides the rest of it.
03
Theme build
The design built as Liquid sections and blocks on a development store you can visit whenever you like, held to the same performance budget as any other build here. Reviewed in weekly increments rather than revealed at the end of the month.
04
Payments, apps and integrations
Gateway connected in test mode and exercised with card and cash-on-delivery journeys end to end, courier and back-office connections built, and every installed app justified in writing with its monthly cost next to it.
05
Migration, launch and handover
Redirects tested on staging, DNS prepared in advance, then real test orders placed on the live store before anyone announces it. You receive the theme repository, the app list and a recorded walkthrough of the admin for whoever adds products and fulfils orders.
Stack
Boring technology, chosen so the next developer recognises it.
Nothing here is exotic. That is the point: an unusual stack is a lock-in mechanism dressed up as innovation.
- Front-end
- Next.jsReactTypeScriptTailwind CSSAstro
- CMS & commerce
- WordPressShopifySanityPayloadWooCommerce
Deliverables
What you receive, and what it costs you to keep.
A Shopify store carries a running cost as well as a build cost. Both are written down before launch rather than discovered later on a card statement.
- The theme as a Git repository in your own account, deploying to the store through Shopify's GitHub integration
- A development store you can log into, with test orders already placed through it
- The catalogue as an importable CSV plus the metafield definitions, so the data model is readable outside the admin
- On a migration, a redirect map covering every old URL, tested before DNS moves rather than after
- A written app list — what is installed, what each one costs monthly, and what breaks if it is removed
- Payment gateway, delivery zones and tax rates configured and documented, with the gateway account in your name
- A recorded admin walkthrough for whoever adds products and fulfils orders
The app list is the least glamorous item here and the one most often missing. A Shopify store's monthly cost is the platform subscription plus every app still renewing against it — and an app installed for one campaign renews exactly like the one the business opens daily, which is how a store ends up paying for two or three nobody can account for.
Pricing
What a Shopify build costs, and what Shopify bills separately.
Quoted per store
fixed price
A Shopify build is quoted per store rather than picked off the page-count tiers, because what sets the work is the catalogue, the gateway and integration work, and whether anything is being migrated. The AED 16,000 Launch tier is a marketing site rather than a store: selling adds tax, delivery and reconciliation work that does not shrink with page count. A full commercial store — a larger catalogue, Arabic, or a payment and CRM integration — sits in the Growth tier from AED 48,000, and stores with ERP integration or several markets start at AED 95,000. Prices exclude 5% VAT and are billed in milestones. Shopify's own subscription and your gateway's transaction fees are billed to you directly by them, not through us.
What changes the priceWhat that covers
- A written scope, with anything the platform will not do listed inside it
- A custom theme, built as sections your team can rearrange
- Catalogue, variants, collections and metafields modelled before import
- A UAE payment gateway and cash on delivery, exercised before launch
- Delivery zones, tax rates and market settings configured
- The theme repository, the app list and a recorded admin walkthrough
Retail and consumer brands
The catalogue is the product: sizes, colours, bundles, and a seasonal collection that has to be built and retired without a developer in the room. Stock has to agree with whatever the shop floor or the warehouse says, returns are an everyday flow rather than an edge case, and most of the traffic arrives on a phone with the photography doing the selling.
Food, drink and speciality grocery
Delivery is the hard part rather than the storefront — zones, cut-off times, minimum orders, and a courier that has to receive the order without anyone retyping it. Repeat purchase carries the economics here, so reordering, subscriptions and a checkout a returning customer can finish without thinking matter more than the homepage does.
Shopify is the hosted option inside our wider development practice and it is the one where the checkout, the security and the servers stay the platform's problem rather than becoming yours. If the commercial rules have to live inside the checkout — contract pricing, stock held in an ERP, delivery logic Shopify will not express — the e-commerce development page is the closer fit.
Questions
Asked before a Shopify project starts.
It is quoted per store rather than off a page count, because the catalogue, the gateway and any migration set the work. The AED 16,000 Launch tier is a marketing site rather than a store. A full commercial store — a larger catalogue, Arabic, or a payment and CRM integration — sits in the Growth tier from AED 48,000, and stores with ERP integration or several markets start at AED 95,000. All exclude 5% VAT, and Shopify's subscription and your gateway's fees are billed to you by them.
Yes in AED, and usually through a third-party gateway rather than Shopify's own. Whether Shopify Payments is open to your business is worth checking against Shopify's own country list at the time you set the store up, because that list changes. The gateways worth comparing locally are Telr, PayTabs and Network International, with Tabby or Tamara where instalments matter and Apple Pay for mobile checkouts. Shopify adds a transaction fee of its own when you use an external gateway, at a rate set by your plan.
Yes, but right-to-left is theme work rather than a setting. Shopify's translation tooling handles the words; mirroring the layout, flipping icons and progress indicators, and choosing a typeface drawn for Arabic all happen inside the theme. Purchased themes differ widely in how far their right-to-left support goes, so judge one by its Arabic demo rather than its feature list — a half-mirrored layout is the usual reason an Arabic store reads as an afterthought. Arabic is included from the Growth tier and planned from the start.
Not if the redirects are built before the move rather than after it. Shopify puts /products/, /collections/ and /pages/ into its URLs and will not let you remove them, so every product and category address changes when you migrate. We map each old URL to its replacement, test the map on the development store, and only then move DNS. Some movement while Google recrawls is normal.
Buy one if the catalogue is small, the brand is flexible and you want to be selling this month — a good purchased theme is a sensible purchase and we will tell you so. Have one built when the store has to look like your brand rather than a configuration of somebody else's, or when merchandising needs sections the theme does not have. What we avoid is the middle: a bought theme cut about so heavily that its next update breaks the changes.
Usually not. Plus is what you buy when the checkout itself has to behave differently — custom logic at checkout, B2B pricing, higher API limits, more staff accounts. On the other plans the checkout can be styled and extended at fixed points, but not restructured. If your commercial rules live in the checkout, settle that before the theme is designed, because it changes what the store can be asked to do.
As few as it can get away with. Every app is a monthly subscription and, more often than not, another script running on your storefront — which is how app-heavy stores get slow without anyone touching the theme. We build in the theme what is cheap to build there, and use an app where the app is genuinely better: reviews, subscriptions, cash-on-delivery forms. You get a written list with the cost of each.
Shopify handles the tax rate; it does not handle your filing. You can set the 5% UAE rate, show VAT-inclusive prices and have orders carry the tax line. What a compliant tax invoice must show, and when you are obliged to register, is your accountant's territory rather than ours — and where the default order printout does not carry the fields they ask for, that is theme or app work quoted separately.
Ready to build something that lasts?
Tell us what you need. You will get a scoped response with an indicative price — from an engineer, not a salesperson.