An ecommerce website in Saudi Arabia starts around SAR 12,000 for a custom build and around SAR 9,000 on Shopify, taking six to ten weeks. Beyond the build, budget for payment gateway fees, ZATCA e-invoicing integration, and the product photography and data that most quotes quietly exclude.
Build cost, by approach
There are three realistic routes to a Saudi online store, and they price very differently.
- Shopify storefront, from SAR 9,000. Fastest to launch, monthly platform fee, limited by what the platform allows.
- Custom store on Next.js, from SAR 12,000. More control, better performance, no platform ceiling, higher build cost.
- Headless commerce, meaningfully higher. Worth it for large catalogues or complex merchandising, overkill for most first stores.
The costs most quotes leave out
The build is rarely the whole number. These are the line items that surprise people three weeks in.
- Payment gateway setup and transaction fees. Ongoing, not one-off, and they vary by provider and by card type.
- ZATCA e-invoicing integration. If you invoice in the Kingdom, this reaches into your order flow, not just your accounting.
- Product photography. For a hundred products this is often a larger line item than the website itself.
- Product data entry. Titles, descriptions, variants, weights and dimensions for shipping.
- Shipping integration and rate logic, which is more fiddly than it sounds once you have zones and weight bands.
- Hosting and domain, modest but ongoing.
If a quote does not mention ZATCA, photography or product data, it is not a complete quote. Ask before you sign, not after.
Which payment methods do you actually need?
This is where Saudi ecommerce differs most from a generic international build. Mada is the domestic card scheme and it carries the majority of card payments in the Kingdom. A checkout that only offers Visa and Mastercard will lose a meaningful share of buyers who had every intention of paying.
- Mada, essential. Not optional for a Saudi consumer store.
- Apple Pay, high usage and high conversion on mobile.
- Visa and Mastercard, for international and corporate cards.
- STC Pay, widely used wallet.
- Tamara and Tabby, buy now pay later. These lift conversion noticeably on higher-value baskets.
- Cash on delivery, still expected in some categories, and it carries its own operational cost.
What does ZATCA e-invoicing add?
Businesses invoicing in Saudi Arabia must issue ZATCA-compliant e-invoices. For an online store that means invoices need to be generated correctly at the point of sale, with the required fields and formatting, rather than reconciled by hand afterwards.
Done as part of the build, it is a scoped integration with a clear cost. Retrofitted later, it is more expensive and usually involves a period of manual work in between. It belongs in the original scope.
Shopify or custom? A straight answer
Choose Shopify if you want to launch quickly, your catalogue is straightforward, and you are comfortable with a monthly fee and the platform's constraints. It is a good product and there is no shame in it.
Choose a custom build if performance matters to your rankings, if you have merchandising or pricing logic the platform fights you on, if you need deep ERP integration, or if platform fees at your volume start to exceed what a build would have cost. The crossover point arrives faster than most merchants expect.
A realistic first-year budget
For a small to mid-size Saudi store launching properly, plan for the build at SAR 12,000 upward, product photography and content as a separate line, payment processing fees as a percentage of revenue, and a modest ongoing budget for hosting and maintenance. Marketing sits on top of all of it and is usually the largest number of the lot in year one.
The mistake we see most often is spending the entire budget on the build and nothing on getting traffic to it. A good store with no visitors earns less than an average store with customers.
