Shopify or a custom-built store in the UAE?

For most businesses selling online in the UAE, Shopify is the right place to start. It is quick to launch, secure, handles payments in dirhams and costs little each month. A custom-built store earns its higher price only when your products, pricing or operations do not fit the way Shopify works.

Brnded17 builds both, so we have no reason to push you towards either. This guide covers what Shopify really costs in the UAE, how payments work here, and the point at which a custom build becomes the better decision.

Why this decision matters more each year

Online retail in the UAE reached AED 42.2 billion in 2025, up from AED 17.6 billion in 2020, according to a report by EZDubai and Euromonitor. It made up about 15.7% of all retail sales and is forecast to pass AED 67 billion by 2030.

The platform you pick decides how much of that growth you keep, and how much goes on fees and workarounds.

What Shopify costs in the UAE

These are the plans on Shopify’s UAE pricing page on 5 October 2026. Shopify bills in US dollars.

Plan	Per month, billed yearly	Per month, billed monthly	Shopify Payments card rate
Basic	USD 24 (about AED 88)	USD 32	2.9% + AED 1
Grow	USD 69 (about AED 253)	USD 92	2.8% + AED 1
Advanced	USD 299 (about AED 1,098)	USD 399	2.7% + AED 1
Plus	from USD 2,300 (about AED 8,450)		2.5% + AED 1

International cards cost about one percentage point more on each plan.

The plan fee is the small number. Three other costs matter more.

• Payment fees. On AED 50,000 of monthly card sales across 200 orders, Shopify Payments on Basic costs about AED 1,650.
• Apps. Reviews, subscriptions, bundles, advanced search and loyalty usually come from paid apps, each billed monthly.
• Design and setup. A store that looks and works like your brand needs designing. At Brnded17, a customised Shopify store costs AED 14,000 to 18,000.

A sum worth doing before you upgrade

People often upgrade plans to get a lower card rate. Check the numbers first. Advanced costs about AED 1,010 a month more than Basic and saves 0.2% on card fees. That only pays for itself once you take more than about AED 505,000 a month in card sales. Grow breaks even against Basic at about AED 165,000 a month. Below those figures, upgrade for the features, not for the rate.

Payments in the UAE

This is the area that has changed most, so older advice may be out of date.

Shopify Payments now works in the UAE. Shopify lists the UAE as a supported country. It takes Visa and Mastercard along with Apple Pay and Google Pay, pays out in dirhams, and is for online sales only.

You can use another gateway, at a price. If you use a third-party payment provider instead of Shopify Payments, Shopify adds its own fee on top: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus. That is in addition to what the provider charges.

Provider	Published UAE rate for local cards
Shopify Payments (Basic)	2.9% + AED 1
Stripe	2.9% + AED 1, plus 1% for international cards
Telr	2.25% to 2.45% plus AED 0.50 to 1, with a monthly fee on lower volumes
Tap Payments	2.75% + AED 1

Other providers, including Checkout.com and Network International, quote on request.

Buy now, pay later. Tabby and Tamara both have Shopify apps. You need a merchant account with each, and their fees are set in your contract, so ask for them in writing before you plan your margins.

Cash on delivery is shrinking. A Checkout.com report found that the share of shoppers in the region preferring cash on delivery halved between 2020 and 2023, to as low as 10% in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. It is still worth offering, but it no longer needs to shape your whole operation.

VAT. Online sales delivered in the UAE carry the standard 5% VAT, the same as sales in a shop.

What Shopify does well

• Speed to launch. A good store can be live in three to four weeks.
• Security and hosting. Handled for you, including the checkout.
• A checkout people trust. Shopify’s checkout is fast and familiar, with one-tap wallets.
• An enormous app store. Almost any standard feature already exists.
• Low running effort. No servers to look after, no updates to apply.

If you sell physical products with ordinary pricing, Shopify will do the job for years.

The signs you have outgrown it

You have outgrown Shopify when you spend more time working around it than working in it.

• Your app bill is larger than your plan. Paid apps add up quickly, and each one slows the store a little.
• Your products do not fit. Made-to-order items, configurators, services sold with products, or prices that change per customer.
• You sell to businesses. Quotes, approval steps, credit terms and customer-specific price lists strain a standard shop.
• Orders are retyped. Your team copies orders from Shopify into a spreadsheet or another system to fulfil them.
• You run memberships or bookings alongside products. These usually need their own logic.
• The checkout needs to change. Outside Shopify Plus, how far you can alter it is limited.

What a custom store gives you instead

A custom store is built around your business, not the other way round.

• Your rules. Pricing, bundles, subscriptions and delivery work exactly as you need.
• One system. The shop, the orders, the stock and the customers live together. For WhizzFix, we built the website, online booking with card payments and the staff system as connected parts, so a booking lands with the team the moment it is paid for.
• No platform fee on sales. You pay your payment provider and nothing on top.
• Speed you control. No app scripts slowing the pages.

The costs are real too. A custom store takes longer, costs more to build and needs someone to maintain it. At Brnded17 a bespoke build starts from AED 20,000, and a custom system with operations behind it starts from AED 25,000.

The middle path: headless Shopify

You do not always have to choose. With headless Shopify, the shop front is custom-built for speed and design freedom, while Shopify still runs the products, checkout and payments underneath. It suits brands that want a distinctive, fast store without giving up Shopify’s checkout and back office.

Shopify or custom: a quick guide

If this sounds like you	Choose
Standard products, standard pricing, launching soon	Shopify
A strong brand that wants a unique, very fast store	Headless Shopify
Custom pricing, quotes, memberships or bookings	Custom
Orders must flow into your own operations system	Custom, or Shopify connected to a custom back office
Not sure yet	Start on Shopify, and move when the signs above appear

Moving without losing your Google rankings

Whether you move to Shopify or away from it, one step protects your search traffic: redirecting every old page address to its new one. Miss it, and product pages that took years to rank disappear from Google overnight.

We map every address before a move and test the redirects after launch. It is part of every store we build and a core part of our technical SEO service.

Brnded17 designs and builds ecommerce websites in Dubai on Shopify, headless Shopify or fully custom, at a fixed quote. For wider budgets, see how much a website costs in Dubai.