How to Open an Online Store in Saudi Arabia

Sellers ask us the same thing before they have sold anything: do I need the commercial registration before the first order, or after it? I spent a long time assuming the answer was a revenue figure that separated the two cases, so I went looking for that figure in the Commercial Register Law, approved by Royal Decree M/83 and in force since 3 April 2025, and it is not there. The line is drawn elsewhere. The E-Commerce Law distinguishes a seller entered in the register, a تاجر, from a seller who is not, a ممارس, and treats both as lawful service providers, which makes the question one of status rather than income.

The demand side is not the hard part either. GASTAT's ICT Access and Usage survey for 2025 found that 71% of individuals aged 15 to 74 buy goods and services online, rising to 80.2% among Saudis, and that the most purchased category is clothing, footwear and sports goods, at 88.8% of online shoppers. So the audience for a printed piece already exists. What remains is administrative and operational: what has to be true before the first customer pays.

What changed in the commercial register

The register became one register. The Ministry of Commerce, announcing the law on the day it took effect, described a single commercial registration per establishment covering the whole Kingdom and all of its activities, which ended both per-city registration and the old requirement that activities be homogeneous. The expiry field went with it, replaced by an electronic annual confirmation of the register's data, filed every twelve months from the date of issue.

That confirmation is not free, and this is the detail most write-ups get wrong. The government service pages price it at SAR 500 for a sole establishment, SAR 1,000 for a general or limited partnership, SAR 1,200 for a limited liability company, and SAR 1,600 for a joint stock or simplified joint stock company. Miss the due date by ninety days and the register is suspended, along with every licence issued against it. A year after suspension begins, the entry is cancelled outright unless the trader lifts the suspension and files what was missed.

Sub-registers are the other place a confident sentence does damage. What ended is their issuance, not their existence: holders were given five years from the in-force date to correct the status of existing sub-registers, and all of them are struck at the end of that window, around 3 April 2030. Read "abolished" and you might let a live sub-register lapse, which is how a register that is still doing work quietly gets suspended.

Documentation moved off Maroof

Documenting the store no longer runs through Maroof. The Ministry of Commerce called on online store owners to document their stores on منصة الأعمال instead, and named it the approved platform for the purpose, on two conditions: a valid commercial registration or freelance document, and a commercial bank account. The platform now sits under the Saudi Competitiveness and Business Center, المركز السعودي للتنافسية والأعمال, the body created by merging the National Competitiveness Center with the Saudi Business Center under Cabinet Decision 662.

Documentation itself is free, takes five to seven working days, and ends in a certificate. One small condition in it stops a lot of applicants: the link you submit has to be a working store, not a page on a social network. The E-Commerce Law then adds display duties that have nothing to do with which platform you chose. Article 6 requires your name or distinguishing identifier, your contact channels, and the number of the register you are entered in. Article 7 requires the consumer to see, before contracting, the total price inclusive of every fee, tax and delivery amount.

The two VAT numbers that decide

VAT in Saudi Arabia is a number, not a judgement call. The standard rate is 15%, in place since July 2020 and restated by the Zakat, Tax and Customs Authority in guidelines it published in May 2026. The two thresholds that place you are equally explicit: registration is mandatory once your taxable supplies exceed SAR 375,000 over a rolling twelve months, and voluntary registration opens at SAR 187,500, a test you can meet on taxable expenses rather than on supplies.

There is a second test that most explanations drop. Article 4 of the Implementing Regulations looks forward as well as back, so expecting to cross the mandatory threshold in the coming twelve months can oblige you to register before your backward-looking total has reached SAR 375,000 at all. Anyone who has sold through one large season knows how far apart those two readings sit.

E-invoicing runs as two phases at once rather than one. The generation phase has bound every resident taxpayer since 4 December 2021. The integration phase arrives in waves by revenue band, and as of 16 September 2026 the latest announced is Wave 25, published on 24 July 2026. It covers taxpayers whose VAT-taxable revenues exceeded SAR 187,500 in 2022, 2023, 2024 or 2025, with integration into the Fatoora platform due no later than 1 February 2027.

The platform decision stays yours

This is where the usual running order inverts. The platform looks like the big decision because it is the first thing anyone sees, and it is the only decision on this list you can revisit without touching your commercial registration, your VAT position or whoever manufactures for you. We connect to all three of the platforms below, and to others through an API, so there is no version of this choice we profit from steering.

Read their pricing pages on 16 September 2026 and the differences all sit in one place: where each platform puts online payment and e-invoicing on its plan ladder. Salla's entry plan is free and does not accept online payments; card acceptance starts at Salla Plus at SAR 990 a year, and Salla Pro is SAR 2,990. Its ZATCA integration is a free first-party app, restricted to the Pro and Special plans. Zid's free Starter plan is limited to bank transfer and cash on delivery, with mada and card acceptance beginning on the next tier up at SAR 99 a month or SAR 990 a year, while its Fatoora connection is native to the dashboard rather than an app install, and free to use.

Shopify has no free tier at all. It runs a three-day trial, then 1 USD a month for three months, then 19 USD a month on Basic billed annually, and every price on its Saudi page is quoted in dollars rather than riyals. The detail that changes the arithmetic is that Shopify Payments is not available to Saudi merchants, so a Saudi store routes through a third-party gateway and Shopify adds its own transaction fee on top of the gateway's: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced. The admin ships in Arabic, but whether the storefront renders right to left depends on the theme you pick rather than on the platform.

The honest summary is that all three do the same jobs and disagree about which rung of the ladder to put them on. Choose against what you need in month one, not against what you might need in year three.

Payment and delivery, from the customer's side

Saudi payment behaviour has already settled. The Saudi Central Bank reports electronic payments at 70% of total retail payments in 2023, 79% in 2024, and 85% in 2025 across 14.6 billion transactions. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, e-commerce spending on mada cards rose from SAR 69.3 billion in the same quarter of 2025 to SAR 98.4 billion, a jump of 41.9% in twelve months.

Which makes mada and Apple Pay the starting point rather than an addition. Apple lists Saudi Arabia among the countries where Apple Pay is supported, on a page published 9 September 2026, and both Salla and Zid list Tabby and Tamara instalments among the payment methods a merchant can switch on.

Delivery now carries one condition that is not negotiable. The Transport General Authority announced on 17 April 2025 that from January 2026 parcel delivery companies must reject any shipment without a valid National Address, and that is live today rather than pending. It makes the address field at checkout part of whether an order can be fulfilled at all, not an administrative box. Read up on shipping companies in Saudi Arabia before you commit to one, and write the return policy on day one instead of after the first return.

The product, and who makes it

That leaves the question no platform answers: who makes the thing you are selling. There are three routes. Buy inventory and freeze your cash in it before you know what sells; resell a supplier's finished product and leave quality and timing in hands you never see; or use print on demand, where the piece is made after the customer has paid rather than before.

Distance is most of what separates them. Printing inside Saudi Arabia compresses the journey to days instead of weeks plus customs, and it means the sample in your hand is the same article that reaches your customer. For anyone selling apparel, this decision, not the platform decision, sets what you can honestly promise on a product page.

Where Tamm fits

Tamm is a factory and a warehouse in Saudi Arabia, and the print-on-demand service provider behind your store. You keep selling on the platform you already use; when an order arrives we print the piece on our own line and ship it to your customer under your brand. It is not a store platform and it does not compete with Salla, Zid or Shopify. How an order crosses from your store to the line

The first order finds what you missed

None of these steps told me what I had left out. The first real order did. A customer paid for one piece, and every field left blank showed itself on the way: an incomplete National Address that held the shipment at the courier, a price that excluded delivery and so read higher at checkout than the product page had promised, an invoice nobody had yet decided who issues. The running order above does not prevent any of that. It makes what surfaces small enough to fix in a day. Buy the first piece from your own store before a stranger does, pay with the card your customers pay with, and follow the parcel to your own door. What you find on that short trip is your real checklist.