About This Service
Shopify Arabic Storefront & RTL Setup for UAE and Gulf Merchants
An Arabic Shopify store is not a translation job — it is a layout job. Machine-translated strings dropped into a left-to-right theme produce broken navigation, misaligned icons and unreadable product pages that Gulf shoppers abandon instantly. I build a proper right-to-left (RTL) Arabic storefront on your existing Shopify store using Shopify Markets and the Translate & Adapt app: the theme is genuinely mirrored — menus, sliders, drawers, breadcrumbs and cart all flow right-to-left — and Arabic typefaces are chosen and loaded so headings and prices render crisply instead of falling back to a generic system font.
The setup covers the full bilingual stack for the Emirates: an AED-first market configuration, hreflang tags pairing your English and Arabic URLs so Google serves the right language to the right searcher, checkout translated into Arabic end-to-end, and a practical workflow your team can follow for keeping product titles, descriptions and metafields bilingual as the catalogue grows. Arabic-first stores consistently win trust with shoppers across Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah and the wider GCC — buyers complete checkout more readily in their own language and script.
Unlike my general Shopify theme customization and private-app gigs in this category — which build features and sections for any store — this gig is exclusively the Arabic/RTL localization layer: mirroring, fonts, Markets, translations and bilingual SEO plumbing. If your store works fine in English and you simply need it to sell properly in Arabic, this is the right gig.
What's included
- True RTL theme mirroring — Sections, navigation, drawers, sliders and product galleries flipped properly for right-to-left reading — not just translated text in an LTR shell.
- Shopify Markets + Translate & Adapt — Arabic configured as a published language with Markets, using Shopify's native translation infrastructure.
- Arabic web fonts that render well — Carefully selected Arabic typefaces for headings and body so the storefront looks designed, not auto-translated.
- AED + hreflang configuration — AED pricing as the primary currency plus hreflang pairs so English and Arabic pages rank separately and correctly.
- Arabic checkout end-to-end — Checkout, notifications and policy pages reviewed in Arabic so the buyer never hits an English wall at payment.
- Bilingual content workflow — A documented routine for your team to keep new products and collections bilingual after handover.
How it works
- 1Store & theme review
I assess your current theme's RTL readiness, your catalogue size, and which pages and notifications need Arabic coverage first.
- 2Markets, language & RTL build
Arabic is added via Shopify Markets and Translate & Adapt, the theme is mirrored for RTL, and Arabic fonts are integrated and tuned.
- 3Translate & localize content
Navigation, key pages, policies, checkout and notification templates are localized; product translation is set up with your preferred workflow.
- 4QA across devices & handover
Both language versions are tested on mobile and desktop, hreflang is verified, and you get a walkthrough of maintaining the bilingual store.
Why work with me
| With me | Typical agency | |
|---|---|---|
| Genuine RTL mirroring of the theme | Translated strings only | |
| Native Shopify Markets setup (no paid translation app lock-in) | ||
| Arabic typography hand-tuned | Default system fonts | |
| Bilingual workflow documented for your team |