A media buyer for UAE.
Seif Gomaa builds stores and runs ads for brands selling in the UAE, in AED, in Arabic and English. Prices carry 5% VAT inside them, so the profit maths starts by taking it out. The client store I can name there is A87 Fragrance, moved from WooCommerce to a new Shopify store.
Usually answered the same day, Cairo time.
How do you price with UAE VAT when running ads?
Prices in the UAE are shown with 5% VAT included, so 4.76% of every shelf price is tax (5 ÷ 105). The price in the ad, on the product page and at checkout should be the same number, with VAT inside it.
The profit maths runs without VAT. On a UAE home-goods brand, VAT came out of the average order first, then product cost, fulfilment and returns, and only then the break-even CPA. Skip that step and every ROAS you read is 5% better than the real one, and the break-even CPA comes out higher than the margin can pay.
Flat delivery or free delivery above a threshold?
For A87 Fragrance the owner chose one flat delivery fee on every UAE order, with no free-delivery threshold. So every line that promised free delivery came off the store: the announcement bar, the trust block, the FAQs, the delivery section on the product page, the shipping policy and the cart progress bar.
Whichever you choose, the ad, the product page and the cart have to say the same thing about delivery. A shopper who finds a delivery fee at checkout that the ad did not mention leaves there.
Which payments does a UAE store need?
Cards and Apple Pay at least, and Tabby, which UAE shoppers already use to split a payment. On A87, Shopify Payments carries the cards and Apple Pay, and Tabby was part of the brief from the start, because the old WooCommerce store already offered it.
What changes when a UAE brand moves from WooCommerce to Shopify?
A87 Fragrance had a WooCommerce store in English and Arabic. The Shopify store was built fresh rather than copied: eight scents in two sizes, where the 10 mL is a variant of the same product and not a separate one, a bilingual notes card as the second image on every product, every image in WebP, and Meta, TikTok, Snapchat and Google set up with tracking before the ads move over.
Only the reviews that were real on the old store came across. A new store with a wall of reviews it did not earn reads as fake to the people the ads are paying for.
What happened on real UAE stores?
Shopify · UAE
A87 Fragrance: from WooCommerce to a new Shopify store
The situation. A87 Fragrance, a niche perfume brand selling in the UAE in AED, ran on WooCommerce in English and Arabic. The owner agreed to be named here.
What we found. The catalogue sells in two sizes, the shoppers read both languages, and the payment brief included Tabby. Midway through the build the owner moved from free delivery above a threshold to one flat fee, so every delivery line on the store had to change.
What we changed. A new Shopify store built in October 2026 through Rabehni: eight scents each in 85 mL and 10 mL, custom sections for the hero, the scent grid, the notes and the gift box, one flat UAE delivery fee stated the same way everywhere, every image in WebP, and the ad accounts set up with tracking.
What happened. The new store went live on 8 October 2026 at a87.shop. No sales figures are quoted until they have been measured.
WhatsApp and Instagram · UAE
A home-goods brand in the UAE: starved, not broken
The situation. Sales ran through WhatsApp and Instagram messages. The ads optimised for conversations and there was no purchase pixel, so Meta reported no revenue at all, and the owner had cut spend.
What we found. Working from the owner's own sales file, with the 5% VAT taken out first: blended MER was 32.5x against a break-even near 2.3x, and ad spend was 7% of gross profit. Sales were flat year on year while spend was cut by 67%, and the two months with almost no spend were the two worst, down 80% and 86% on the year before. The leak was after the click: click-to-conversation fell from 9.4% to 3.9% while CPM went down.
What we changed. A budget sized from contribution after VAT instead of from habit, one tracker where the owner types sales and orders each month and gets a scale, watch or stop verdict, and a media plan built around the website the brand is moving to, so the ads can optimise for purchases instead of chats.
What happened. The question changed from "do ads work for us?" to "how much should we fund them, and can they see a purchase?". Results go here once the website is live and measured.
Clients are not named unless the owner agreed. Figures are ratios only, with no sales, spend or order counts.
What should you read next?
Case study: A87 Fragrance, WooCommerce to Shopify
Salla, Shopify, EasyOrder or WooCommerce: the full comparison
Media buyer for a Gulf store: check the store before raising spend
Store builds on Salla, Shopify, WooCommerce and EasyOrder
Work out your own break-even (free calculator, KWD, SAR, AED or IQD)
Questions about selling in the UAE.
Who builds stores and runs ads for brands in the UAE?
How do I price with UAE VAT when running ads?
Moving from WooCommerce to Shopify in the UAE: what carries over?
Is free delivery worth it in the UAE?
Do I need Tabby on a UAE store?
Tell me about the store.
WhatsApp is fastest. If you would rather not start a chat yet, leave a number and a link and I will message you within 24 hours.
Usually answered the same day, Cairo time.