A good Arabic Shopify store needs a right-to-left theme, an Arabic font that looks clean on phones, product copy written by a person, Arabic URLs set up correctly and testing on real phones. Our Shopify custom theme with Arabic and English starts from AED 14,500, excluding 5% VAT.
You switch the store to Arabic. The menu jumps to the wrong side, the price sits behind the photo and half the buttons are still in English.
RTL themes
Arabic reads right to left, so the whole layout should mirror: menus, product galleries, icons with direction, progress bars, cart drawers and form fields. A theme that only flips text will look broken. Test any theme in Arabic before you buy it.
Arabic fonts
- Choose a font made for Arabic, not a Latin font with fallback
- Use slightly larger sizes and more line height than English
- Keep weights to two or three so pages stay fast
- Check numbers: decide on Western or Arabic-Indic digits and use them consistently
Translating products
Machine translation of product names often reads awkwardly, and some words mean different things in Gulf Arabic. Have a native writer do the top products and category pages, and use translation tools only for a first draft of long-tail items.
✓ Shopify’s translation tools, supported languages and markets features change. Check the current Shopify Help Centre before choosing a method. Last checked October 2026. Confirm with Shopify.
The language switch
A visitor who has put items in the cart should not lose them when they switch language. Keep the switch visible at the top, remember the choice and show the same product in the other language.
URLs and SEO in Arabic
Give each language its own address, such as /ar/, tell Google which pages are translations of which with hreflang and write Arabic page titles and descriptions. Do not rely on a browser translation button.
Checkout and messages
Check the whole journey: checkout labels, payment buttons for Tabby and Tamara, order emails, shipping notifications and WhatsApp messages. The checkout is where untranslated text is most common.
Testing on phones
- Open the store in Arabic on an iPhone and an Android phone.
- Add to cart, change quantity, remove, check out.
- Look for text cut off, wrong alignment and overlapping buttons.
- Check long product names and prices.
What it costs
Arabic and English are included in our custom theme package from AED 14,500 (6–8 weeks); the launch store from AED 4,950 can be set up for both languages on a standard theme. Content writing is separate if you need it.
Questions
Not for a store that wants Arabic customers to trust it. Use a person for key pages.
No. Check each theme’s demo in Arabic.
Not if fonts are limited and images are sized properly.