A media buyer for Saudi Arabia.
Seif Gomaa builds Salla and Shopify stores and runs their ads for brands selling in Saudi Arabia. On one Saudi Salla store 0.41% of visitors added to cart, so the work started on the product page, not on the ads.
Usually answered the same day, Cairo time.
Salla or Shopify for a store in Saudi Arabia?
If most of your sales are inside the Kingdom, Salla is usually the shorter road: an Arabic dashboard, mada and the local couriers ready to switch on, and a checkout Saudi shoppers already know. Shopify gives more room if you sell in several countries or need an order flow Salla does not allow, such as a cash-on-delivery form on the product page itself.
One thing to plan for on Salla: on the store below, the cart asked for the recipient's city and mobile number, and then Salla asked for an SMS login code before payment. That is the platform's own flow, so the product page has to do the convincing before the shopper reaches it.
Which payment methods does a Saudi store need?
mada first, then Apple Pay, STC Pay, Tabby and Tamara. On one Saudi Salla store, more than half of the orders over 90 days were paid with Tabby or Tamara, and mada took almost all of the rest.
Cash on delivery had no orders in that window. In the audit the products were registered as services instead of physical products, which switches off shipping and, with it, cash on delivery. A setting like that is invisible from the ads side.
How does 15% VAT change the numbers?
Saudi shoppers see prices with 15% VAT included, so 13% of every shelf price is tax, not revenue (15 ÷ 115). Break-even CPA and ROAS are worked out on the price without VAT. Measured on the VAT-inclusive price, the same ads look 15% better than they are.
Which ad channels work in Saudi Arabia?
Snapchat and TikTok carry a lot of Saudi traffic, so their pixels go in with Meta's before launch. On the gifts store below, TikTok's catalogue campaign returned a 3.46 ROAS from late September to mid-October, while Meta ran at 0.76 and Google at 0.60, and both were paused. The rule is not that one platform wins in Saudi Arabia; it is to fund the channel the store's own numbers point to and stop the others early.
What happened on a real Salla store?
Salla · Saudi Arabia
A gifts store on Salla in Saudi Arabia: 0.41% add to cart
The situation. Visitors were arriving from TikTok and Meta and almost nobody bought. The owner's question was which ads to change.
What we found. 99.6% of visitors left before the cart: an add-to-cart rate of 0.41%, against the 5 to 8% a healthy store sees. The product page asked for five required fields before the buy button. The products were registered as services, which switched off shipping and cash on delivery. And the running campaign optimised for traffic, so TikTok was sending visitors who converted at 0.04%.
What we changed. The product page was cleared: no required fields before the buy button, plus a quick buy. Campaigns moved from traffic to sales. The catalogue campaign that targeted the whole country was switched off, because the store delivers to two cities only, and the new campaigns target those two cities.
What happened. TikTok's catalogue campaign returned a 3.46 ROAS from late September to mid-October; Meta (0.76) and Google (0.60) were paused. Then TikTok slipped from 4.6 to 1.4 over five days as the winning ad tired, so the next job is new creative, not a bigger budget.
Clients are not named unless the owner agreed. Figures are ratios only, with no sales, spend or order counts.
What should you read next?
Questions about selling in Saudi Arabia.
Who can run the ads for my store in Saudi Arabia?
Salla or Shopify for a Saudi brand?
Do I need Tabby and Tamara?
Is Snapchat the main channel in Saudi Arabia?
Should I count VAT in my ROAS?
Tell me about the store.
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Usually answered the same day, Cairo time.