Shopify stores for Kuwait
A Kuwaiti store that cannot take KNET is not a store. Everything else on this page follows from that one fact, and it is the fact most agencies leave out of the proposal.
Why a Kuwaiti store is different
Roughly two thirds of online payments in Kuwait go through KNET. Card-only checkout loses most of the market on the last screen, after you have paid for the traffic that brought them there.
Shopify Payments, the built-in processor that most Shopify advice assumes you are using, is not available in Kuwait. Neither is Stripe. So a Kuwaiti store runs on a local gateway — MyFatoorah or Tap — connected as a third-party provider.
That works well. It is also not free, and the cost is the part nobody writes down.
What Shopify actually costs you here
Because the payment provider is third-party, Shopify charges a fee on every order on top of whatever the gateway charges. It falls as you move up the plans:
| Shopify plan | Extra fee per order |
|---|---|
| Basic | 2.0% |
| Grow | 1.0% |
| Advanced | 0.6% |
| Plus | 0.2% |
The arithmetic matters more than the percentage. A store doing KD 10,000 a month on Basic pays about KD 200 in this fee alone. On Advanced it pays about KD 60, and the plan costs roughly KD 83 more — so the move pays for itself at that volume and keeps paying above it.
We work this out with you before the build, not after. It changes which plan you start on.
What it costs
Two parts, kept separate so you can see exactly what you are paying for.
Development — KD 990, once. Design and build in Arabic and English, KNET connected through MyFatoorah or Tap, products loaded, and the store launched. Paid in advance, before work starts.
Management — KD 195 a month. Everything after launch: the changes real customers force, monitoring, and the ordinary work of keeping a live store selling. A twelve-month agreement billed quarterly at KD 585 every three months, each quarter paid in advance, renewing automatically.
The two are separate because a store is not finished when it launches. The development fee pays for building it. The monthly fee pays for it still working in month nine, when the gateway changes something or an update breaks a step in checkout.
What is not included
Your Shopify subscription and your gateway fees are paid by you directly to Shopify and to MyFatoorah or Tap — we do not resell them and we do not mark them up.
Also outside the scope: paid advertising budgets, photography, and warehouse or delivery operations.
How long it takes
A first store on a customised theme is usually live in two to three weeks, most of which is waiting on product data and gateway approval rather than on us. MyFatoorah onboarding takes three to seven working days and needs your commercial licence.
A migration from another platform takes longer and depends entirely on how clean the existing data is.
Arabic that reads like Arabic
Right-to-left is not a checkbox. Line breaks, numerals, currency and punctuation all behave differently, and a store where the Arabic looks machine-made loses trust before the customer reaches checkout. We build both languages as first-class, because we run Arabic products of our own.
Send us a message on WhatsApp and tell us what you sell. If you would rather not use Shopify, WooCommerce carries no platform fee at all.
Tell us what you need
A few details and we will come back to you the same working day. Sunday to Thursday, 9:00–15:00 Kuwait.