How to set up a Shopify store in Arabic, step by step
Tarz guides · Published August 2026
Shopify supports Arabic as a storefront language, and the setup takes about five steps: add Arabic under Settings → Languages, choose a theme that genuinely renders it, translate your content with Shopify's free Translate & Adapt app, decide which language is the default, and set up regional payments and currency. The theme is the step stores most often get wrong.
What are you actually setting up?
An Arabic storefront is three separate jobs that are easy to conflate. The language is a Shopify setting — a few clicks. The content — product titles, descriptions, policies — is translation work, and Shopify gives you a free tool for it. The direction and typography — the page flowing right-to-left, Arabic type that reads like Arabic — belong entirely to your theme, and no admin setting can fix a theme that was never built for them. That is why step 2 below gets the most attention.
The five steps
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Add Arabic and publish it
In your Shopify admin, go to Settings → Languages and add Arabic. Adding it makes the language exist; publishing it makes it visible, so shoppers can actually switch to it on your storefront. This step translates nothing by itself, and it does not turn the layout right-to-left — those are the next two steps.
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Choose a theme that genuinely renders Arabic
Online Store 2.0 themes control their own layout direction, so this decision does the heavy lifting. Three checks separate a theme that supports Arabic from one that merely tolerates it:
- Arabic locale files ship with the theme. Buttons, cart notices and form labels come from the theme's own translation files. If there is no Arabic file, every one of those strings stays English until someone translates them by hand.
- Direction follows the language, not a CSS hack. The page direction should be set from the active storefront locale automatically — not by an "enable RTL" switch, and not by an override stylesheet patched on top of a left-to-right design.
- The typography is built for Arabic script. Proper Arabic families, letter-spacing at zero in Arabic contexts, and sensible handling of numerals. Arabic letters connect; a theme that tracks its headings will pull the joins apart.
The full eight-point version of this test is in our Shopify RTL checklist.
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Translate your content with Translate & Adapt
Shopify's free Translate & Adapt app is where your catalogue becomes Arabic: product titles and descriptions, collections, pages, store policies, and image alt text — the field everyone forgets, and the one screen readers and image search actually use.
Checkout is translated by Shopify itself. You do not need to translate checkout strings, and your theme cannot break them — one part of the store you can cross off.
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Make Arabic the default if your market is Arabic-first
The default language is what first-time visitors and search engines get. If you sell primarily to Arabic speakers, make Arabic the default and keep English as the secondary language, not the other way round. An Arabic-speaking customer who lands on an English page and has to hunt for a language switcher is a customer you made work for it.
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Set up the regional details
Three things shoppers in the region check before trusting a new store. First, payments: methods like Mada, STC Pay, Tabby, Tamara, Fawry and ValU, depending on your market and what your payment provider supports. Second, currency: price in the currency your customers think in. Third, filter labels: on collection pages these come from Shopify's Search & Discovery app and are store data, not theme strings — set them in Arabic there, or your filters will stay English on an otherwise fully translated storefront.
Three pitfalls that make an Arabic store look half-finished
English buttons on an Arabic page
"Add to cart" sitting under an Arabic product title is the most common failure, and it is almost always a theme locale gap: the theme shipped without Arabic translation files, so its interface strings never had an Arabic version to fall back on. Translation apps can paper over some of it, but every theme update brings new untranslated strings.
Product titles that scramble
Real catalogues mix scripts — a variant like XL — أحمر, a Latin brand name inside an Arabic title, a SKU, a price. Without bidi isolation in the theme's markup, punctuation and numbers jump to the wrong side of the line and a tidy title turns into a puzzle. This is invisible in a demo store with single-language titles and very visible in yours.
Latin letter-spacing applied to Arabic
Latin design leans on tracked-out headings and buttons. Arabic letters join, so applying that same letter-spacing tears the connected letterforms apart — legible, technically, the way a ransom note is legible. A theme built for Arabic locks letter-spacing to zero wherever Arabic script renders.
How Tarz collapses the hard parts
Tarz is an Arabic-first Shopify theme, so step 2 and all three pitfalls are handled before you install it. Arabic is the default locale — storefront strings and theme-editor strings both, so your team sets the store up in Arabic rather than guessing at English section names. Direction comes from the storefront locale by construction: the theme is written in CSS logical properties throughout, with no override stylesheet to fall out of sync. Inherently left-to-right strings — prices, SKUs, coupon codes, phone numbers — are bidi-isolated so mixed titles never scramble, and letter-spacing is locked to zero in Arabic contexts across a licence-audited library of 53 Arabic font families. English is not an afterthought either: Arabic and English run on the one theme, and the layout mirrors itself when a shopper switches language.
Tarz is in final development and heading into Shopify's theme review; the planned launch price is $300, one time. We are not publishing a date we cannot hold — the waitlist is where launch news arrives first.