Building a Bilingual Arabic–English Shopify Store

A bilingual Arabic–English store is standard for serious brands selling in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and increasingly for UK and US brands targeting Gulf shoppers. Shopify handles the plumbing well: languages, translated URLs, hreflang and localised checkout. The parts that decide whether the Arabic store feels native are the theme's right-to-left (RTL) behaviour, the quality of the Arabic copy, typography and Arabic search optimisation.

This guide explains how to plan, build and test an Arabic–English Shopify store, based on Shopify's documentation and W3C and Google standards as of October 2026.

How Does Shopify Handle Multiple Languages?

You publish additional languages on the same store, and each published language gets its own URLs. When a translation exists, the store shows it; when it does not, the store falls back to your default language.

Once a language is published, checkout and email notifications are displayed in the customer's language, and you can edit and preview notification translations per language. That matters for Arabic because order confirmations, shipping updates and abandoned-cart emails are part of the experience, not an afterthought.

Shopify Markets sits on top of this. A market is a country or group of countries with its own currency, pricing, languages, domain or subfolder, payment methods and duties settings. A typical Gulf setup is a UAE market in AED and a Saudi market in SAR, each with English and Arabic published.

Which Translation Method Should You Use for Arabic?

Start with Shopify's free Translate & Adapt app, then add human review. Translate & Adapt auto-translates up to two languages for free, allows unlimited manual translations and supports SEO fields, with a side-by-side editor and options to adapt content per market.

The alternatives are bulk CSV import of translations, useful for large catalogues translated by an agency, or third-party translation apps that add glossaries, translation memory and professional translator workflows.

Whatever the tool, set a quality bar by page type:

• Human-written or human-reviewed: home page, top collections, best-selling products, size guides, checkout text, policies and transactional emails.
• Machine-translated then spot-checked: long-tail products and older blog posts.
• Not translated: brand names, model numbers and SKUs, which should stay in Latin script.

Remember the content merchants most often miss: navigation menus, filter and option values such as sizes and colours, metafields used on product pages, theme strings like "Add to cart" and "Sold out", gift card and discount messages, and text inside app blocks. If a shopper sees English on a button or filter halfway through an Arabic journey, the whole experience feels unfinished, so export a full list of translatable resources and track completion by type.

Build a short glossary first: how you translate product types, sizes, materials and calls to action. Consistency across thousands of strings matters more than any single elegant phrase.

What Makes a Shopify Theme RTL-ready?

An RTL-ready theme sets the page direction in HTML and lays out every component using direction-aware CSS. The W3C's guidance is to add dir="rtl" to the html element whenever the document is right-to-left, and not to rely on CSS for base direction.

That single attribute flips paragraph alignment, text flow, table column order and form input direction. Everything else depends on how the theme's CSS is written. The W3C recommends logical properties — margin-inline-start rather than margin-left, text-align: start rather than left — so one stylesheet works in both directions.

Mixed-direction text deserves special care. Product names often combine Arabic with English brand names, sizes and numbers. Use dir="auto" for user-generated or dynamic content and the bdi element to isolate embedded text, so punctuation and numbers do not jump to the wrong side. If you are weighing a premium theme against custom development for this reason, see custom vs premium Shopify themes.

How Should You Choose Arabic Fonts?

Pick a screen-optimised Arabic typeface with the weights your design needs, and pair it with your Latin brand font so both scripts feel like one brand. Arabic letterforms are more detailed than Latin, so they need a slightly larger size and more line height.

• Widely used web options include Noto Naskh Arabic and Noto Kufi Arabic, IBM Plex Sans Arabic, Cairo and Tajawal.
• Load fonts only for the Arabic locale, and only the weights you use, to protect load times; see speeding up your Shopify store.
• Decide on numerals: Western digits (0–9) or Eastern Arabic digits. Use one style consistently in prices, sizes and phone numbers.
• Avoid letter-spacing on Arabic text; it breaks the joins between letters.

How Do Hreflang and URLs Work for an Arabic Shopify Store?

Shopify generates them for you. Hreflang and related meta tags are created automatically for every international domain or subfolder you set up, and sitemaps include all published languages.

Shopify recommends subfolders, such as /ar or /ar-sa, for most stores: they need minimal setup and benefit more from your primary domain's search strength than separate domains or subdomains. Submit your sitemap in Google Search Console after changing your domain or language setup.

Under Google's rules, each language version must reference itself and every other version, or the tags are ignored. Codes use ISO 639-1 for language (ar, en), optionally with an ISO 3166-1 region (ar-AE, ar-SA), and x-default catches visitors whose language is not listed. Because Shopify derives this from Markets, plan the market and language structure before you launch rather than reorganising it later.

How Do You Handle Currency and Pricing for Arabic Shoppers?

Show local currency per market, for example AED for the UAE and SAR for Saudi Arabia, with prices that look deliberately set rather than converted. Shopify Markets lets you set pricing in local currencies per market.

Check how prices render in Arabic: where the currency symbol or code sits relative to the number, whether it reads correctly right to left, and whether rounding rules produce tidy local prices. Make sure taxes are displayed consistently with each country's rules; our guides to selling on Shopify in the UAE and Shopify for Saudi Arabia and the GCC cover VAT and payments.

How Is Arabic SEO Different from English SEO?

Arabic SEO needs separate keyword research, not translated keywords. Gulf shoppers search in Modern Standard Arabic, in Gulf dialect, in English and sometimes in Arabic written with Latin characters, and the highest-volume term for a product may not be its dictionary translation.

1. Research Arabic queries per market; Emirati and Saudi wording can differ for the same product.
2. Write Arabic SEO titles and meta descriptions natively rather than translating English ones word for word.
3. Translate image alt text, collection descriptions and FAQs, which also feed AI answers in Arabic.
4. Decide on URL handles: Arabic handles are readable in the browser bar but turn into long encoded strings when shared, so many stores keep Latin handles.
5. Build internal links within the Arabic version so it is not an island.

The fundamentals of technical and content SEO are the same as in English; see Shopify SEO: rank in Google and AI search.

How Should You Test a Bilingual Store Before Launch?

Test every journey in both languages on real mobile devices, because most RTL bugs only appear on small screens or inside apps.

1. Switch languages from every page type and confirm you land on the equivalent page, not the home page.
2. Complete a purchase in Arabic with each payment method, including BNPL and cash on delivery.
3. Check order confirmation, shipping and abandoned-cart emails in Arabic.
4. Review carousels, menus, drawers, filters and pop-ups in RTL.
5. Validate hreflang output in page source and in Search Console.
6. Ask a native Arabic speaker from your target market to read the store as a customer would.

For broader trust and design expectations of UAE buyers, read website design in Dubai and the UAE.

How VEATEX Helps

VEATEX is a Shopify, web and software development agency that also builds Peppol e-invoicing platforms for the GCC, working with clients in the US, UK and the Gulf for over 11 years. We build and fix bilingual Arabic–English Shopify stores: RTL theme work with logical CSS, Arabic typography, Markets and language structure, translation workflows and pre-launch testing in both directions. We also adapt custom sections and app widgets that break in RTL. See our Shopify development services, or our website design and development work for non-Shopify Arabic sites.