Run a WooCommerce store you own outright.

A hosted platform for most stores, WooCommerce when ownership is worth paying for. Shopify is the right answer when you are selling a straightforward catalogue and want the server, the updates and the tax engine to be run by somebody else, and there is nothing second-rate about that choice. WooCommerce earns its place on three conditions: the gateway rate is large enough that negotiating it matters, the checkout has to do something a plan will not allow, or the store and the content site have to live in one property. If you already run WordPress, the third is usually true before anyone asks. We give you that answer on the first call rather than after the quote.

Telr, PayTabs, Network International, Checkout.com and Stripe all publish a ready-made WooCommerce integration, and Tabby and Tamara sit alongside them as instalment options. The part that matters is not the list, it is that the merchant agreement is between the gateway and your own entity rather than between the gateway and a platform. That means the rate is negotiated, the settlement lands in your own bank account, and when a payment fails you escalate it yourself. Which one suits you depends on what you sell, who buys it, and whether the checkout needs Arabic at the last step. We check the current terms with you rather than printing a rate card here, because they move.

The plugin is free and the store is not. What a store here pays for is hosting sized to the catalogue, the paid extensions the build depends on, the gateway rate on every order, and somebody to keep the thing patched. What it does not pay is a monthly plan or a share of the sale, and at real order volume that difference is the entire argument for the platform. We itemise all of it as one annual figure before the build starts, so the comparison against a hosted platform is a ledger rather than a slogan.

Yes, with an extension configured to do it, which makes the invoice a build decision rather than a setting. A UAE tax invoice carries the supplier TRN and a sequential number with no gaps, and it is due within 14 days of the supply; a simplified tax invoice is permitted only at AED 10,000 or less, or to a customer who is not registered. Whether you owe one at all is threshold-gated: registration is mandatory once taxable supplies and imports pass AED 375,000 over 12 months, and voluntary above AED 187,500. We place a test order and read the invoice the store produces before it opens for business.

Less than a rebuild, more than a plugin install. The install you have decides most of it: a site drawn in a page builder usually needs the shop templates built properly rather than drawn again, and a theme with no maintained commerce templates will not stretch to a catalogue. What is genuinely new is the ownership layer, which is a merchant account, hosting sized for a store rather than a brochure, and an invoicing obligation the content site never had. If the WordPress side is the part that worries you, the WordPress build itself covers what your own team can and cannot change, and what a first build involves for a company trading inside one emirate is set out on web design in Dubai.

Yes: one install, one catalogue, two locales. A multilingual layer sits over WooCommerce and gives every product, category, attribute and checkout string its own Arabic version linked to the English one, with the reading direction switching per locale. Two things decide whether it actually works. The theme has to carry a maintained right-to-left stylesheet, because no plugin invents a layout the theme never had, and the checkout has to be walked end to end in Arabic rather than assumed: a payment step that renders left to right after a right-to-left cart is where the order is lost. What we will not do is machine-fill the product copy and call the store bilingual. Where the Arabic copy is not funded, the structure is built to take it and that is written down before the build starts.

Yes, and the redirect map is the whole job. Products, categories, customers and orders move first, then every old URL is mapped to its new one and the map is tested against a crawl before the switch rather than after it. Rankings lost in a migration are almost always lost to URLs nobody mapped, not to the platform change itself. Where the category structure has to change as part of the move, we sequence the two so they do not land in the same week. What to watch afterwards is set out on ecommerce SEO.

Yes, and the ceiling is the hosting rather than the platform. A large catalogue puts pressure on the database first, so the answer is indexing, a specified server and cache rules that know which pages must never be served twice, none of which WooCommerce decides for you. What breaks a big store is almost always a default install nobody sized, or a stack of extensions each running its own queries on every page load. We specify the hosting against the catalogue you expect in year two and hand you the specification, so it can be taken to any host you like.

In the region the orders come from, which for a store selling here means the UAE or the Gulf. AWS has run an in-country region, me-central-1, since 29 August 2022, and local managed hosts sit on comparable infrastructure, so this is neither exotic nor a premium purchase. The reason is not delivery speed: a CDN already serves your images and cached pages from an edge in Dubai whatever continent the origin sits on. It is the part a cache cannot hold, which on a store is most of what matters. The cart, the checkout, a logged-in account and a search across the catalogue all wait on the origin on every single request. Data residency, where it applies to you, is a separate question decided by your entity rather than by the store. What we specify is the size of the server against the catalogue you expect in year two, and that specification is yours to take to any host.