Sell more online, inside what your licence allows.

Selling online is a licensed activity, so the licence has to cover it. In Dubai, an online business on the mainland applies through the Department of Economy and Tourism, and there is a separate home-based e-trader route for people working from their residence. Every eTrade licence needs an approval or a no-objection certificate from the TDRA, and a digital trader may sell only goods and services that are legally approved for trade in the UAE. There are free zone routes as well, Dubai CommerCity among them. Federal Decree-Law No. 14 of 2023 on trade by modern technological means is the instrument behind all of it.

Generally not direct, and not without a route that permits it. A free zone entity reaches mainland customers through a mainland distributor, a mainland branch, or a permit, and in Dubai that permit route sits under Executive Council Resolution No. 11 of 2025, where the temporary permit is capped at six months. Federal Decree-Law No. 14 of 2023 also brings free zone entities into scope where goods or services bought through modern technology are supplied outside the zone. The effect on marketing lands on the offer: a discount advertised to the whole country has to be one you can actually fulfil to the whole country.

Part of the listing does. Cabinet Decision 66 of 2023 requires a detailed specification statement for each commodity in its original language and in Arabic, alongside the producer and importer details, the country of origin and the return terms. That is a requirement on the listing, and it is a separate question from whether Arabic earns its place in your search and campaign work, which is answered on eCommerce SEO. In practice the specification statement is written once per product family and reused, which is why the template matters more than the page count.

Yes. Cabinet Decision 66 of 2023 requires a supplier to hold prior permission from the competent authority both to offer and advertise a discount, and to promote or advertise a commodity or service. The same article gives the consumer a right to be refunded the price difference where a discount begins within a week of their purchase and they were not told, which is a reason to publish the calendar internally rather than decide offers week by week. Treat the permission as a dependency with a lead time, the way you would treat stock arriving. It is a different instrument from the advertiser permit an influencer or creator holds before publishing.

One budget, two sets of numbers. The counter and the store share a licence, a catalogue and usually a stockroom, so splitting the budget by channel puts them in competition for the same customer. What has to stay separate is the measurement: a store order and a counter sale carry different costs to serve, different return behaviour and different receipts. We read them in one view and judge both on profit after acquisition cost, delivery and returns. Where the two genuinely serve different buyers, and in Sharjah that is often the wholesale side rather than the retail one, we scope them as two engagements and say so.

Not to the consumer side yet. Ministerial Decision 244 of 2025 puts business-to-consumer transactions out of scope until a further Ministerial decision, so a store selling to shoppers is not on the first clock. The business-to-business side is, and a retailer that also sells wholesale sits on both sides of that line at once. The step worth taking now is to know which of your revenue is which before the dates arrive, because the answer decides what the finance team has to change and when.

It is scoped rather than priced from a menu, and two things move the figure more than anything else. The first is the state of the catalogue: a hundred products already carrying what the regulation requires is a different engagement from a thousand that carry none of it. The second is how much of the promotional calendar is already committed, because permission lead times are work whether or not the campaign is creative. Channel mix and the number of emirates you deliver to then set the media side. We scope it after reading the licence, the catalogue and the last offer you ran.