Your store is not broken. It is imported.

Your payment plan does not depend on Shopify Payments.

Shopify Payments is not offered to Lebanese-registered businesses, so a build that assumes it has a hole at the checkout.

You have completed a real card payment on your own store, not just installed the gateway.

An installed gateway that has never taken a live payment is an assumption, and checkout is where assumptions surface in front of a buyer.

Your billing descriptor is recognisable as your brand on a bank statement.

An unrecognised descriptor produces disputes from customers who simply did not remember buying from you.

You are not counting on Shopify Protect to cover chargebacks.

Shopify Protect covers US stores only, on Shop Pay through Shopify Payments, so it does not reach a store here at two separate points.

You have read your gateway's dispute terms and know the evidence deadline.

Prevention is the whole defence when no platform scheme stands behind you, and deadlines are missed by people who read the terms after the dispute.

If you were told a US LLC solves payments, you have checked what it actually requires.

The passport route is real, the US address where operations primarily occur is the wall, and Form 5472 carries a $25,000 penalty for a company that may owe no tax.

You know your own refusal rate from your own orders, not from an article.

Across the Lebanese stores we run the range is 15 to 25 percent, which is our figure, not a published statistic, and yours will differ.

A refused order is costed three times in your margin: the stock, both delivery legs, and the ad that won it.

Counting only the delivery charge understates the loss by most of its value, and the ad spend is the part people forget.

Orders are confirmed before dispatch by a human or a message, not shipped blind.

A confirmation step is the cheapest refusal reduction available and it happens before you have paid a courier anything.

Prepaid is rewarded with a discount rather than cash being penalised with a surcharge.

Removing cash on delivery as a policy change signals hostility to your cash paying customers and cuts revenue overnight. Reward framing consistently outperforms.

Your courier's cash payout cycle is in your cash flow model.

A delivered order is not collected money until the courier settles, and stores run out of cash while profitable on paper.

Returned stock is inspected and the unsellable share is counted as loss.

A parcel that travels twice does not always come back in sellable condition, and treating it as recovered inventory overstates margin.

Your delivery promise was written by whoever runs fulfilment, not by whoever writes copy.

An over-promised date produces a refusal at the door and a review you keep for years.

Delivery outside Beirut is priced and promised differently from inside it.

A flat national rate quietly subsidises your most expensive orders and prices you out of your cheapest.

Order updates reach the customer where they actually read, which here is WhatsApp.

Email-only tracking is a default from a market with different habits, and it produces the where-is-my-order messages that fill your inbox.

You have completed a real checkout to a real address in every zone you sell to.

From Shopify API version 2026-10 a live rates app no longer attaches its rate to your shipping zones on install, so checkout can show no delivery option with nothing in the admin to warn you.

Your delivery cost assumes fuel moves, rather than treating today's rate as fixed.

Fuel and generator costs reset frequently here and every courier price follows them, so a margin built on one month's rate expires quietly.

Prices display in the currency your buyer actually thinks in.

A buyer converting in their head before they can judge your price is a buyer you have added friction for, at the worst moment.

You price from landed cost per unit, not from the supplier invoice.

Freight, the import fee, VAT, broker and Beirut charges stack on top of the supplier price, and a low quote can become a much higher landed cost.

A freight or fuel move triggers a price review on a named date, rather than whenever someone notices.

Margin here is eroded by drift, not by one bad decision, and nobody is watching the number that moved.

Your free shipping threshold sits deliberately above your average order value.

A threshold below AOV gives away delivery on orders that would have cleared it anyway.

Your Arabic was written by a native speaker, not produced by a machine pass.

Machine translated Arabic is visible on first read and it costs both conversion and paid efficiency.

Right to left layout has been checked on an actual phone, not assumed from the theme description.

Themes claim RTL support and break it in the places that matter, which are checkout, forms and anything with an icon beside text.

Your product pages answer the delivery and payment questions before anyone has to ask.

Every unanswered question here becomes a WhatsApp message, and the ones who do not message simply leave.

Your visible contact method is the one people in this market use to reach a business.

A contact form as the only route is a default from somewhere else, and it reads as a company that does not want to be contacted.

You have checked whether Shopify Scripts were doing anything for you before they stopped.

Scripts stopped executing on 30 June 2026. Checkout still works, so nothing looks broken, while discounts and shipping rules quietly stop applying.

Your app stack has been reviewed for whether each app does anything in this market.

Apps installed from a US-written tutorial charge monthly to solve problems you do not have, and a few of them touch checkout.

The trust badges on your site refer to things that are actually true.

Decorative badges that promise guarantees you do not offer are a liability in a dispute and a credibility loss when a buyer tests one.

Your returns window is one you actually honour.

A policy copied from a template and not followed produces the disputes it was meant to prevent.

Your analytics counts customers rather than your own sessions and previews.

Development and preview traffic inflates every number you plan from, and on a store with a few hundred real visitors it is a material share.

If you ship to the EU, your listings carry an EU-established responsible person.

Since 13 December 2024 an EU listing must show one by name and address, and most dropshipped products do not have one.

A buyer can find out who they are buying from without leaving your site.

In a market where people have been burned, an anonymous store is the one they close.