Shopify Partner Agency for MENA and the GCC

Shopify Plus earns its licence when the operating need is real: B2B with company profiles and price lists, expansion stores per market, checkout extensibility, higher-volume automation through Flow, or permissions that a growing team actually needs. Those are operational problems, and Plus solves them.

It doesn't solve a conversion problem, and it doesn't make a thin catalogue sell. We check the business case against the licence and the implementation cost before recommending it, and we've told brands to stay on standard Shopify more often than we've moved them up. Replatforming from BigCommerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud or a custom stack is scoped separately, because the data, integrations and redirect map are the work, not the theme.

A migration is a data project wearing a design project's clothes. Products, variants, customers, order history, subscriptions, reviews and URLs all have to arrive intact, and the redirect map is what decides whether you keep the rankings you already have. We plan that map before anything is built, because it is the single thing that cannot be fixed afterwards without losing traffic in the meantime.

For Saudi brands moving off Salla or Zid, the specific issues are ZATCA e-invoicing continuity, Mada and local payment coverage, and Arabic content that was written natively on the old platform and must not be round-tripped through translation. We scope those before quoting, and we say plainly when a migration isn't worth the disruption.

Controlled A/B testing needs volume. Around fifty thousand monthly sessions is the point where a test reaches significance in a sensible timeframe; below that, testing mostly produces confident-looking noise. Most stores in this region are below it, which is why our conversion work starts with diagnosis and sequenced fixes rather than a testing programme we would be selling you for its own sake.

That means walking the checkout on a real phone on a real local network, reading session recordings, and pricing each fix by what it's worth. Payment method coverage, shipping thresholds, Arabic product content and mobile checkout friction account for most of what we find, and none of them need a test to justify fixing.

Shopify SEO in this region is mostly three problems. A product catalogue written in English and translated afterwards. A collection structure that fights the way people actually search in Arabic. And the technical issues Shopify creates by default, from duplicate collection paths to parameter bloat.

We fix the structure first, write Arabic natively rather than translating it, and set up Bing properly alongside Google. ChatGPT search and Copilot read Bing's index, and a growing share of buyers now ask an assistant before they ask a search engine.

Every engagement opens with a two week diagnostic before anything is built or rebuilt. We read the last twelve months of revenue, spend and returns, walk the checkout on a real phone on a real local network, and pull the payment, shipping and tax constraints of each market you sell into. Most of the problems we find aren't design problems. They're margin problems hiding inside shipping thresholds, payment method coverage and product content that was written in English and translated afterwards.

From there we agree a single sequence rather than a wish list. If checkout is leaking, checkout gets fixed before paid media is scaled. If Arabic content is thin, that comes before a redesign. If the store is technically fine and the offer is the constraint, we say so and work on merchandising and retention instead of shipping a new theme you don't need. The sequence is written down with owners and dates, and it's the same document we review with you every fortnight.

Delivery runs in two week cycles. Each cycle has a small number of shipped changes, a short written note explaining what moved and why, and a live dashboard you can open any time. We report on revenue per visitor, contribution margin and payback period. Return on ad spend is included because you'll be asked about it, but it's never the number we optimise towards, because a store can post a healthy ROAS while quietly losing money on shipping and returns.

We stay small on purpose. The senior people in the first call are the people writing the copy, building the theme sections and sitting in the ad accounts. There's no account management layer, no weekly status theatre, and no junior handover once the contract is signed. That's the trade: fewer clients at a time, direct access to the people doing the work.

Byblos Horizon has managed more than $2.5M in advertising spend and built more than fifteen Shopify stores across Lebanon, the Gulf and Europe. Our founder generated over a billion organic YouTube views before starting the studio, which is why distribution and creative velocity sit at the centre of how we plan growth rather than being treated as an add-on.

Two engagements are documented from start to finish. Homepal covers a UAE e-commerce and logistics launch, including how payment and delivery expectations shaped the build. Ecua Market covers a B2B brand acquisition programme in the CEMAC region. Both write-ups include the constraints and the parts that were harder than expected, not just the highlights.

For a wider view of what good looks like in this region, read our breakdown of the best Shopify stores in MENA, the Arabic-first Shopify guide, and the honest numbers in the real cost of a Shopify store in Saudi Arabia. If you're weighing platforms, Shopify versus Salla versus Zid lays out where each one wins.

This works best for founder-led brands with:

• Real volume already, or the product and margin to get there.
• A clear category.
• A decision-maker who can approve changes inside a week.
• A willingness to fix unglamorous things, like shipping tables and product copy, before chasing a redesign.

Brands selling into more than one MENA market benefit most. That is where payment, tax and logistics differences stop being trivia and start deciding profitability.

It is not a fit in three cases:

• You want spend scaled immediately, without proving a creative and offer combination first.
• You want an English-only build in a category where Arabic decides conversion.
• You need a resident team in the Gulf.

On that last one: we deliver remotely from Beirut and Paris on Gulf hours, and we have no office or staff in the Gulf. Better said here than discovered in month two.

If you're Lebanon-based, the Shopify agency in Lebanon page covers local pricing and constraints in more detail, and AI marketing in Beirut covers the automation side. Our commercial terms are published in full on the terms page.