Salla, Shopify, EasyOrder or WooCommerce? Picking a Platform for a COD Store (2026)

Most platform comparisons are written from the merchant dashboard: themes, apps, the monthly fee. I see the other end. I pay for the traffic that lands on these stores, so what I care about is what happens between the ad click and a delivered order.

That is the angle of this page, and it is why my answer changes with the market far more than with the feature list.

Salla or Shopify for a store in Saudi Arabia?

If most of your sales are inside Saudi Arabia, Salla is usually the shorter road: an Arabic dashboard, mada and the local shipping companies built in, and a checkout Saudi shoppers already know. Shopify gives you more room if you sell across several Gulf countries or in Egypt, or need an order flow Salla does not allow, such as a cash-on-delivery order form on the product page itself. On one Saudi Salla store I looked at, the add-to-cart rate was 0.41%: almost nobody who arrived added anything. That was a store problem before it was an ads problem, and moving it to Shopify would not have touched it.

So the market decides first. My Salla store builds start from the same break-even sheet as the Shopify ones, and on both I install the Snapchat, TikTok and Meta pixels and test them with real orders before the first riyal goes out. Snapchat and TikTok are main channels in Saudi Arabia, and an ad running on a pixel that cannot see orders learns from the wrong people.

Shopify or EasyOrder for a COD store in Egypt?

If you sell one product, or a handful, on cash on delivery in Egypt, EasyOrder's single-page order form can be the whole store, and it launches fast. Once the catalogue grows past that, Shopify is where most of my Egyptian stores live. Whichever you choose, the pixel and the Conversions API get tested with real orders before the first ad, because in Egypt the gap between Meta's order count and the store's regularly reaches 40%.

This is where I part ways with a lot of advice. EasyOrder is not a beginner platform to be embarrassed about. For a single-product test it is a cheap way to find out whether the offer sells at all, and I set the page order, the offer and the upsell against the break-even sheet the same way I would on Shopify.

The expensive mistake is staying on it after the catalogue has outgrown one page. Every new product then fights for room on a layout built for one, and that is usually the moment I move a brand to Shopify.

Shopify or WooCommerce?

Stay on WooCommerce if you already have a WordPress site whose content brings visitors from Google: the store sits on the same domain, so that traffic keeps working for you. Pick Shopify if the store is new, or if the WordPress site brings little search traffic and the store mainly has to carry paid traffic. On the order side both can run the same path: short, with confirmation, local payments and server-side events. In the Gulf many orders are prepaid, and my Offer Builder models prepaid orders at a 97% delivery rate and a 2.5% gateway fee. That split between prepaid and cash on delivery moves the break-even more than the platform does.

A87 Fragrance, a UAE niche perfume brand, made this move in October 2026: from WooCommerce to a new Shopify store built through Rabehni. Eight scents in 85 mL and 10 mL, Arabic and English, prices in AED, Tabby and Stripe at checkout, flat-rate delivery across the UAE. It went live on 8 October 2026, so it is too early for sales figures, and none will be published until there are real ones.

Can I move platforms without losing traffic?

Yes, if every old link gets a redirect. Products, collections and customers come across, and each link that has been used in ads, bios or chats is pointed at the matching new page, so nothing you already paid to promote ends on a dead page. When I moved a brand in Egypt from EasyOrder to Shopify, that was 30 redirects. The live profit dashboard, which refreshes every 30 minutes, is pointed at the new store before the first ad, so the days after the switch are read in delivered orders, not in Meta's count.

The same works into Salla and out of it. From Zid, WooCommerce or Shopify, the old links are redirected and the pixels are rebuilt and tested before any ad runs.

Before you move at all, make sure the platform is the problem. The free audit gives you three numbers in 48 hours: the most you can pay for an order, your ROAS after delivery, and the biggest leak. Quite often the leak is on the product page, and it travels with you to the new platform.

Cart or order form for a COD store?

On cash on delivery, a short order form on the product page can beat a cart and checkout. Which one wins depends on your basket size and your cancellation rate, because the form removes steps between the ad and the order, and the extra orders only pay if they survive the confirmation call. On one catalogue the break-even was 1.77 ROAS on paper and 2.11 once cancellations were counted, which is how much the cancellation rate can move the answer.

For a store in Iraq I built the form into the product page itself, with no checkout page in between, and the order still lands in Shopify like any other. Salla does not allow that flow, which is one reason I reach for Shopify when a brand needs it.

If your customers usually buy several items, a cart earns its place: a form built around one product makes the second one harder to add. Run your own figures in the COD break-even calculator before you choose.

What does a store cost to run in 2026?

These are plan prices only, checked on 17 October 2026 on each vendor's own pricing page, in the currency the page showed. Shopify Basic is 19 USD a month billed yearly, or 27 USD billed monthly. Salla Basic is free, and Salla Plus is 990 SAR a year, with a 16% discount for paying yearly. EasyOrder charges 0.04 USD per order with no subscription, or a fixed 100 USD a month for high order volumes. WooCommerce itself is free, and you pay for hosting and extensions.

Shopify showed me its US prices in USD. Check shopify.com/pricing from your own country before you budget, and the others at salla.com/plans, easyorders.eg/pricing and woocommerce.com/pricing.

The plan is the smallest line. Apps, a paid theme, payment fees and delivery come on top, and they shape the break-even far more than the subscription does. My own build price is not on this page: I quote it in writing after the free preview of your home page and one product page.