(23) — Ecommerce
Ecommerce websites in Dubai, built to be measured.
An ecommerce site is a measurement problem before it is a design problem. Most of them fail in the same three places — the checkout, the tracking, and the gap between what the platform reports and what actually sold.
Four failures, and they are nearly always these four.
- 01 — The purchase event fires twice
- A tag on the thank-you page and a second one in the platform's own integration, both counting the same order. Revenue in the report is double the revenue in the bank, and the discrepancy is usually found by an accountant rather than by a marketer.
- 02 — Platform analytics and GA4 disagree
- They almost always will — they count different things, at different moments, with different attribution windows. What matters is knowing which number answers which question, and reconciling them once so nobody argues about it monthly.
- 03 — Abandoned checkout with nothing measuring it
- The most valuable failure on the site, and typically the least instrumented. Without events on each checkout step there is no way to say whether people leave at shipping, at payment, or at the account wall.
- 04 — Product pages the platform generates badly
- Auto-generated titles, duplicated descriptions across variants, and category pages that compete with each other for the same term. The store fills with pages that cannot rank and dilute the ones that could.
Store builds, and store rebuilds.
A new store where there is none, or a rebuild where the current one takes orders but cannot say which marketing produced them. The second is more common and usually starts with finding out whether the design is actually the problem.
From AED 3,500 per project, with tracking and conversion setup included. That is the same rate as any other build — there is no ecommerce premium, which is worth stating because charging one is common and the justification for it is usually that ecommerce sounds harder.
The actual job, most of the time.
Purchase and add-to-cart events configured once, de-duplicated, and reconciled against the platform’s own numbers so the two can be read side by side without an argument about which is lying. Checkout steps instrumented individually, because “people abandon the checkout” is not a finding — which step they abandon is.
The four Measurement checks that apply to every build apply here too, and they are published on the work page, with the other sixteen. Run them against your store before paying anyone, including us.
Pages a platform generates are rarely pages that rank.
Left alone, a store produces a page per variant with a title assembled from attributes and a description copied across all of them. Category pages multiply the same way, through filters that each generate a URL. The result is a large site where almost nothing is distinct enough to rank and the pages that could are competing with near-copies of themselves.
Fixing it is structural rather than cosmetic: deciding which pages should exist at all, which should be canonicalised away, and which deserve writing properly. That is the same work described on the SEO page, applied to a catalogue.
We pick the one you can run without us.
We do not publish a list of platforms we are certified in, because the certification is not the thing that matters to you. The platform you can add a product to at 9pm, without calling anybody, is worth more than the one with the longer feature list — and the one your team already understands usually beats the one we would enjoy building on.
The measurement work is the same on any of them. Purchase events, de-duplication, checkout instrumentation and reconciliation are platform-independent problems with platform-specific plumbing, and the plumbing is the easy half.
If the right answer is a platform we have not built on before, we will say that rather than steer you somewhere more comfortable for us. It is the same rule as everywhere else here: you find out what we have and have not done before you pay, not after.
What we turn down.
- No stores we cannot measureIf a platform will not let us configure purchase tracking properly, or the accounts will not be in your name, we do not take the build. There is no way to be accountable for revenue we cannot see.
- No ecommerce premiumThe rate is the published rate. A store is more work than a brochure site and that shows up in scope, not in a different price list.
- No advice on payment processorsWe integrate the gateway you choose. Which one you use is a commercial decision with your bank, and an agency with a view on it usually has a reason to.
Questions, answered plainly.
How much does an ecommerce website cost in Dubai?
From AED 3,500, the same starting rate as any other build. There is no ecommerce premium. What moves the number is scope — how many products, whether the catalogue needs migrating, and whether payment and delivery integrations already exist.
What platform do you build on?
Whichever one you can run after we leave. That is a real answer rather than a diplomatic one: the platform you can add a product to at 9pm without calling anybody is worth more than the one with the better feature list. We will tell you honestly if a platform we have not worked in is the right choice for you, and say so rather than steering you to one we prefer.
Can you fix tracking on our existing store?
Often that is the whole job, and it is cheaper than a rebuild. The audit checks whether the purchase event fires once, whether add-to-cart and checkout steps are instrumented, and whether the numbers reconcile with the platform's own. If the store is otherwise sound we will say so rather than sell you a new one.
Why do our platform sales and Analytics never match?
Because they are counting different things. The platform counts orders it processed; Analytics counts sessions it could attribute, within a window, where tracking fired and consent allowed it. A gap is normal and a large unexplained gap is a defect. We reconcile them once and document which number answers which question.
Do you handle payment gateway integration?
We integrate the gateway you choose and configure the tracking around it. We do not advise on which processor to use or negotiate rates — that is a commercial decision with your bank, and an agency taking a view on it is usually being paid to.
Is tracking included in the price?
Yes, as with every build here. Purchase and add-to-cart events, de-duplicated and reconciled against the platform, are part of the project rather than a line added afterwards. A store you cannot measure is a store you cannot improve.