For most UAE stores choosing between Shopify vs WooCommerce, the deciding factor is payments, not design. Shopify Payments is still in early access in the UAE, so many Dubai merchants run Shopify on a local gateway such as Telr or Network International and pay Shopify an extra third-party transaction fee of 2%, 1% or 0.6% on top of the gateway’s own rate. WooCommerce charges no platform fee on sales, but you pay for hosting, maintenance and security yourself. If you have no developer and a modest card volume, Shopify is usually the simpler call; if you have large catalogues, custom pricing rules or a WordPress content site already ranking, WooCommerce usually wins on total cost.
All plan prices and rates below were read from the official Shopify, WooCommerce, Stripe, Tabby, Telr and Federal Tax Authority pages on 13 September 2026. They change often, so treat them as indicative and confirm before you sign anything.
Key takeaways
- Shopify’s own help centre describes Shopify Payments in the UAE as “in early access, and is available only to certain merchants” (checked 13 September 2026).
- Without Shopify Payments, every card sale through Telr, Network International or another third-party gateway attracts a Shopify fee of 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus.
- Cash on delivery and bank transfers are manual payments, and Shopify says it does not charge third-party transaction fees on them.
- WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin with over 7 million active installations, and its official payment option, WooPayments, supports UAE businesses at 2.9% + AED 1 per domestic card payment.
- Tabby and Tamara publish plugins for both platforms, Telr documents two Shopify apps and Network International maintains an official WooCommerce plugin, so check your preferred gateway’s own documentation before you pick a platform.
- UAE VAT law requires advertised prices to include tax, which both platforms can handle, but neither sets it up for you.
What each store actually costs per month in the UAE
Shopify’s UAE pricing page lists four plans, billed in US dollars. Paid yearly, Basic is $24 a month, Grow is $69, Advanced is $299 and Plus starts at $2,300. Paid monthly, the first three rise to $32, $92 and $399. Hosting, SSL and the checkout are included.
WooCommerce has no subscription at all. The plugin is free on WordPress.org, version 11.1.0 at the time of writing, and needs PHP 7.4 or higher. The cost moves to places that do not show up on a pricing page: a hosting plan sized for your traffic, paid extensions for things like bookings or subscriptions, a premium theme, and someone to apply updates. For a small Dubai shop selling 50 products, that can be cheaper than Shopify. For a store that needs five paid extensions and a managed host, it often is not.
| Cost line | Shopify (UAE page, Sept 2026) | WooCommerce |
|---|---|---|
| Platform subscription | $24 to $299 a month on yearly billing; Plus from $2,300 | None; plugin is free |
| Hosting and SSL | Included | Paid separately to your host |
| Fee when using a third-party card gateway | 2% Basic, 1% Grow, 0.6% Advanced, 0.2% Plus | None from WooCommerce |
| Fee on cash on delivery | None (manual payment) | None |
| Updates, backups, security patches | Handled by Shopify | Your responsibility or your developer’s |
| Local currency display for international visitors | Listed as requiring Shopify Payments | Via plugins |
The third-party transaction fee, worked through in dirhams
This fee weighs more heavily in the UAE than in markets such as the UK, where Shopify Payments is not flagged as early access. Shopify’s pricing page states that “Third-party transaction fees may apply when you use a third-party payment provider (instead of Shopify Payments). The rate depends on your plan.”
Take a Dubai perfume brand selling AED 60,000 a month by card through Telr on the Basic plan. Shopify’s 2% fee is AED 1,200 a month, charged on top of whatever Telr takes. Moving to Grow cuts that fee to 1%, or AED 600. Grow costs $45 more a month than Basic on yearly billing, which is about AED 165 at the Central Bank of the UAE’s fixed rate of AED 3.6725 to the dollar. The upgrade saves roughly AED 435 a month.
The break-even points are simple to calculate:
- Basic to Grow on yearly billing pays for itself once third-party card sales pass about AED 16,500 a month.
- On monthly billing the gap is $60, so the break-even rises to about AED 22,000 a month.
- Grow to Advanced saves 0.4 percentage points for an extra $230 a month, which only pays back above roughly AED 211,000 a month in card sales.
Cash on delivery changes the picture. Shopify’s manual payments documentation says “You aren’t charged third-party transaction fees for manual payments”, and names cash on delivery, money orders and bank transfers as examples. A home-delivery grocery store in Al Barsha where 40% of orders are COD pays the percentage only on the other 60%. One issue we often see is store owners modelling fees on total revenue rather than card revenue, which overstates what Shopify will cost them.
If Shopify Payments is switched on for your account, the third-party fee disappears and the UAE page’s card rates apply instead, from 2.9% + AED 1.00 on Basic to 2.7% + AED 1.00 on Advanced.
Local payment gateways and buy now, pay later
UAE shoppers expect to see familiar checkout options, and for many categories that includes instalments. Both platforms can support the main local providers, but the integrations are built and maintained by the providers, not by Shopify or WooCommerce, so their quality varies.
Card gateways
Telr’s developer documentation lists two Shopify apps: “Telr”, an offsite option that redirects the customer to Telr to pay, and “TelrOnsite”, which keeps the customer on the Shopify domain but supports card payments only. Network International publishes an official WooCommerce plugin, N-Genius Online by Network, which showed version 1.3.7, an update on 9 September 2026 and more than 1,000 active installations when we checked. Stripe’s UAE pricing page lists 2.9% + AED 1.00 per successful domestic card transaction, a useful benchmark when you compare gateway quotes.
WooCommerce’s own gateway, WooPayments, lists the United Arab Emirates as a supported country. Its fee table shows 2.90% + AED 1 per card payment, plus 2% for international cards and another 2% for currency conversion, with a AED 60 dispute fee. There is a catch if you hoped to sign up as an individual: WooCommerce’s documentation says “Businesses in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) do not have access to the Individual account type.”
Tabby and Tamara
Tabby’s Shopify documentation says it processes payments in SAR and AED, which “must correspond to the customer’s billing address”, and accepts orders only for KSA and UAE billing addresses. It supports English and Arabic on its hosted payment page and needs six Shopify webhooks configured during setup, which is the step to test with a real order before going live. On WooCommerce, the Tabby Checkout plugin listed more than 4,000 active installations and the Tamara Checkout plugin more than 2,000. Tamara also documents a Shopify plugin.
From a development perspective, the practical issue is who fixes a failed webhook during Dubai Shopping Festival. On Shopify you raise it with the provider. On WooCommerce your host, your developer and the plugin author can all point at each other, so write that responsibility into your support contract.
Arabic storefronts and right-to-left layouts
Neither platform gives you a finished Arabic store out of the box. Shopify’s language documentation says that when translating into Arabic or Hebrew, you should “check that your theme supports right-to-left languages to ensure that the layout is correct.” It does not publish a list of themes that pass, so test the theme demo in Arabic before you buy it: product grids, the cart drawer, price alignment and the mobile menu are where RTL layouts usually break.
WordPress has a maintained Arabic community site and translation at ar.wordpress.org, so the dashboard itself can run in Arabic, but your theme still needs the same RTL test. A bilingual WooCommerce store normally adds a translation plugin; our WooCommerce development page lists WPML and Polylang as the tools we use, with separate product content for each language. That gives you more control over Arabic URLs and meta descriptions, which matters if Arabic search is part of your acquisition plan, but it adds another paid plugin and another thing to update.
A Jumeirah fashion boutique that needs Arabic mainly for trust at checkout can live with Shopify and a tested RTL theme. A trading company publishing hundreds of Arabic product pages for Google usually benefits from the finer control of WordPress.
VAT settings the platform will not do for you
Article 3 of Federal Decree-Law No. 8 of 2017 on VAT sets the standard rate at 5%, Article 38 says “the advertised price shall include the Tax”, and Article 76 lists failure to display tax-inclusive prices as grounds for an administrative penalty. The Federal Tax Authority sets mandatory registration at AED 375,000 of taxable supplies and imports, with voluntary registration from AED 187,500.
Shopify does not offer its automated tax service in the UAE. Its tax documentation points stores in unsupported regions to manual tax settings or paid third-party tax apps, so you enter the 5% rate yourself and check that product prices are set to include tax. In WooCommerce, the settings are under WooCommerce, Settings, Tax: add the AE country code and rate in the Standard rates table, and set “Prices entered with tax” to “Yes, I will enter prices inclusive of tax”.
One thing to check before launch is that your invoice template shows the tax amount and your TRN once you are registered. That is an accounting question as much as a platform one, and our VAT consultancy team handles the registration side. This section is general information, not tax advice.
Who should self-host on WooCommerce
Self-hosting trades Shopify’s managed security and uptime for full control and no percentage on sales. It makes sense in four situations.
- You already run a WordPress site with years of blog traffic, and moving to Shopify would mean redirecting hundreds of URLs.
- Your pricing is unusual, such as B2B tiers for Deira wholesale buyers, quote-based products or weight-based pricing for gold and spices.
- Your card volume is high enough that a 1% or 2% Shopify fee costs more each month than a managed host plus a maintenance retainer.
- You have a developer, in-house or on contract, who will apply WordPress, WooCommerce and plugin updates within days of release.
Be honest about that last point. The N-Genius plugin above was updated four days before we checked it, and Tamara’s five days before. A store with ten plugins has ten update schedules, and if nobody owns them, the store is exposed. Our web hosting and WordPress development pages cover the maintenance side.
When Shopify is the better choice for a Dubai business
Shopify suits merchants whose main constraint is time rather than money. A new free zone skincare brand run by two founders with no developer gains more from a managed checkout and the 24/7 support listed on every plan than from saving 1% of revenue.
Build time differs less than people expect. According to our Shopify development page, a custom Shopify theme takes 4 to 8 weeks and complex stores with custom apps 10 to 16 weeks. Our WooCommerce page gives 5 to 10 weeks for a standard store and 10 to 18 weeks for complex builds. The bigger saving with Shopify comes after launch, when there is no server to look after.
For a small business we would usually recommend starting on Shopify Grow if you expect more than about AED 16,500 a month in card sales through a third-party gateway, and checking every quarter whether Shopify Payments has been enabled on the account. If it has, re-run the numbers, because the third-party fee disappears.
Five checks before you choose
- Split your expected orders into cash on delivery and card, and apply Shopify’s third-party percentage only to the card share.
- Look in a Shopify trial admin under Settings, Payments to see whether Shopify Payments is offered to you today.
- Pull 12 months of organic traffic for any existing WordPress site, because that traffic is what a migration puts at risk.
- Test the shortlisted theme in Arabic on a phone, including the cart and checkout.
- Name the person who will apply plugin and platform updates, and agree how many days they have after a security release.
If your answers are “mostly card, no Shopify Payments, no WordPress history, and no developer”, Shopify Grow with a local gateway is the usual starting point. If they are “high card volume, an existing WordPress site, and a named person for updates”, WooCommerce is usually the better long-term fit. We also keep an older, general WooCommerce vs Shopify comparison for readers outside the UAE.
