How to choose the best Shopify theme for an Arabic store
Tarz guides · Published 10 August 2026
There is no single “best” theme — there is the theme that passes sixteen checkable criteria in five groups: architecture, language, typography, regional commerce and quality. Every check below runs in a browser against any theme’s own demo or preview, and most themes carrying an “RTL” tag fail the first group.
This guide deliberately ranks nothing. Theme names, versions and feature lists change every quarter; the criteria for judging them do not. Run the checks against every candidate — including ours — and your shortlist builds itself.
The five groups
- Architecture — was it built right-to-left? (criteria 1–5)
- Language — does it speak Arabic out of the box? (6–7)
- Typography — does the Arabic look like Arabic? (8–9)
- Regional commerce — does it sell the way the region buys? (10–12)
- Quality — the bars every theme must clear (13–16)
Where a check says “in a trial”: Shopify Theme Store themes can be tried free on your store before purchase — the theme installs unpublished with everything working, and you pay only when you publish it. That trial is where the deeper checks run.
Architecture: was the theme built right-to-left?
Direction touches every component, so it is either the theme’s foundation or a patch over a left-to-right design. This is the group most “RTL-supported” themes fail — and the failures are visible in any browser.
1. Native RTL architecture
What to check: open the theme’s demo and switch it to Arabic — or open its Arabic demo, if one exists at all — and compare it side by side with the English demo. Read how the theme describes RTL: a setting called “enable RTL mode” is itself the answer.
Why it matters: when direction is architecture, every section and every future update inherits it. When it is a feature toggle, it was bolted on — and every update can knock it loose.
What failure looks like: no Arabic demo anywhere; an “RTL: supported” line in a feature table backed by one screenshot; a manual switch you must remember to turn on.
2. Direction set from the locale
What to check: with the demo in Arabic on a desktop browser, look for two tells: the vertical scrollbar sits at the left edge (on most desktops), and the cursor in the search field starts at the right. Switch to English — both should return to the other side, automatically.
Why it matters: only dir on the document switches on the browser’s bidirectional text engine. CSS can right-align boxes, but it cannot make text, punctuation or the cursor behave right-to-left — and a bilingual store needs direction to follow each customer’s language, not a global setting.
What failure looks like: right-aligned text with full stops at the wrong end of sentences; a cursor starting on the left of an Arabic search box; an “RTL” setting that forces English right-to-left too.
3. CSS logical properties, not an override file
What to check: walk home → collection → product → cart → search in Arabic and hunt for the element that did not move: a badge, a dropdown, a breadcrumb arrow. If you are comfortable in the browser’s developer tools, search the loaded stylesheets for a file with “rtl” in its name — its presence tells you the approach.
Why it matters: an override file reverses physical CSS rule by rule, after the fact. A missed rule throws no error — it just leaves that component left-to-right forever, and every theme update can add a fresh missed rule. Logical properties make the mistake impossible to write.
What failure looks like: a mostly mirrored layout with stragglers — the signature of override-file RTL. Our Shopify RTL checklist covers this hunt in depth.
4. Mixed Arabic–English content
What to check: find a product on the demo whose Arabic title contains a Latin brand name — or, in a trial, rename one product to something like عباية كلاسيك من Noir Studio with a variant like XL — أحمر. View the card, the product page and the cart line in Arabic and in English, then read a price, a phone number and a discount code aloud.
Why it matters: real catalogues are bilingual. Digits, currency symbols, brand names and sizes have no direction of their own; without deliberate isolation the browser rearranges them by context — precisely where trust matters most.
What failure looks like: titles with their word order scrambled; the currency jumping to the wrong side of the price; a coupon code that garbles in the cart.
5. Mobile RTL layout
What to check: open the Arabic demo on your phone. Open the menu drawer and the cart drawer and note which side each enters from; swipe the product gallery and confirm it advances with the reading direction; check the sticky add-to-cart bar sits correctly.
Why it matters: mobile layouts are rebuilt layouts — drawers, accordions, sticky bars, swipe gestures — and every rebuild is a fresh chance to fail RTL. A theme QA’d only on desktop is half a theme.
What failure looks like: drawers sliding in from the English side; galleries swiping against the reading flow; buttons or prices pushed half off-screen.
Language: does it speak Arabic out of the box?
Shopify translates checkout. Everything before checkout — every button, badge and error — comes from the theme’s own locale files, or from you, string by string.
6. Arabic locale completeness
What to check: on the Arabic demo, read the strings no merchant wrote: add-to-cart, sold-out badges, the search placeholder, pagination, cart totals, form errors. In a trial, add Arabic under Settings → Languages and open Shopify’s free Translate & Adapt app — it shows exactly how much of the theme ships untranslated.
Why it matters: theme strings are the theme’s job. Missing keys surface as English fragments in the middle of Arabic pages, and translating hundreds of strings yourself is unpaid theme development. What Shopify itself provides is a shorter list than most merchants expect.
What failure looks like: “Sold out” in English on an Arabic product card; a wall of untranslated theme strings waiting in Translate & Adapt.
7. Arabic theme-editor strings
What to check: in a trial, set your Shopify admin language to Arabic and open the theme editor. Section names, setting labels and help texts come from the theme’s own schema locale files — if the theme ships them, the editor reads in Arabic.
Why it matters: customers see the storefront; your team lives in the editor. A store staffed in Arabic should not need English to configure a section — and whether a vendor bothered translating its own editor is a fair proxy for how seriously it takes Arabic overall.
What failure looks like: an all-English editor behind an “Arabic-ready” storefront; machine-translated labels that mislabel what settings do.
Typography: does the Arabic look like Arabic?
Arabic is a connected script with its own rules. Latin defaults — tracking, italics, tight line-heights — do not degrade it gracefully; they visibly break it.
8. Arabic typography rules
What to check: read the demo’s headings, buttons and product cards in Arabic. The letters must join, nothing should slant, and no dots or marks should be clipped above or below the line.
Why it matters: Latin letter-spacing pulls the joins of connected script apart — the single most visible tell of a Latin-first theme — and Arabic has no italics: an italicised element is just skewed glyphs. Line-heights tuned for Latin x-heights clip Arabic’s marks.
What failure looks like: headings like beads on a string; slanted “emphasis”; clipped diacritics wherever space is tight.
9. Arabic font loading
What to check: what Arabic families does the theme offer as settings — and what actually loads? In the developer tools’ Network panel, filter to fonts and reload the Arabic demo: count the files and check the domain they come from, which should be the store’s own.
Why it matters: Arabic families are heavy. A theme that loads its whole library, or pulls fonts from a third-party host, taxes every single visit; a theme with no real Arabic families leaves your brand set in a system fallback that was never designed for the script. Which Arabic families hold up is its own guide.
What failure looks like: a parade of font files on first load; fonts fetched from external domains; one hard-coded Arabic face — or none.
Regional commerce: does it sell the way the region buys?
An Arabic storefront that checks out like a Western one leaves orders on the table. Cash on delivery, regional payment marks and regional carriers are not extras here — they are the mainstream.
10. Cash on delivery: standard form plus app blocks
What to check: read the theme’s documentation for its answer on COD order-form apps such as EasySell or Releasit. In a trial, install one: its block must be addable to the product page, its button must work, and the theme’s sticky add-to-cart must submit the same form the app attached to.
Why it matters: in Egypt, Morocco and much of the region, a COD form app effectively is the checkout. These apps attach to Shopify’s standard product form through app blocks — a theme that wraps or hijacks the submit breaks them silently.
What failure looks like: a COD button that does nothing; two competing buy buttons; a sticky bar that bypasses the app’s form entirely.
11. Regional payment display
What to check: can the footer and product page show the payment marks your customers look for — Mada and STC Pay in Saudi Arabia, Tabby and Tamara across the Gulf, Fawry and ValU in Egypt — or only a fixed strip of Western card logos? (Accepting these methods is your payment provider’s job; displaying them is the theme’s.)
Why it matters: payment marks are scanned before the buy button is pressed, and the marks that build trust in the region are not the global defaults.
What failure looks like: a hard-coded row of card logos with no regional icons and no way to add any.
12. Regional carriers
What to check: if the theme ships an order-tracking page, does it cover the carriers the region actually ships with — Aramex, SMSA, Bosta — alongside the global ones, and does it link out to the carrier’s own tracking rather than displaying status it cannot know?
Why it matters: “where is my order?” is the region’s heaviest support load, and COD orders live or die on delivery follow-up. Invented tracking status is worse than none.
What failure looks like: a tracking page listing only carriers your customers never use — or one that fabricates progress bars.
Quality: the bars every theme must clear
None of the criteria above excuses a theme from the basics. Slow is slow and inaccessible is inaccessible in every direction.
13. Performance
What to check: run the theme’s demo through PageSpeed Insights on mobile — home, a collection and a product page — and compare like for like against the other candidates’ demos.
Why it matters: speed is conversion everywhere, and mobile networks in the region forgive nothing. Shopify’s own bar for Theme Store themes is a Lighthouse performance average of at least 60 across those page types — treat it as a floor, not a target.
What failure looks like: demo pages that crawl on a phone; heavyweight sliders and frameworks; fonts and scripts pulled from external hosts.
14. Accessibility
What to check: put the mouse aside and Tab through the demo’s header: every menu, including dropdowns, should be reachable; focus should stay visible; and in Arabic the focus order should follow the right-to-left reading order. Check body-text contrast while you are there.
Why it matters: accessibility is customers first, increasingly law, and a Theme Store gate — Shopify requires a Lighthouse accessibility average of at least 90.
What failure looks like: focus vanishing into invisible elements; menus that open only on hover; low-contrast Arabic body text.
15. Theme Store requirements compliance
What to check: is the theme distributed through the Shopify Theme Store? A listing there means the theme passed Shopify’s review — performance and accessibility bars, code originality, no external scripts — and carries an ongoing update obligation, with billing and licensing handled by Shopify. Bought elsewhere, none of that is guaranteed: read what the vendor commits to in writing.
Why it matters: the review is the only independent quality gate a theme passes through, and the update obligation is what keeps a theme alive as Shopify’s platform changes underneath it.
What failure looks like: no review behind the theme, no committed update cadence, and licence keys or activation servers standing between you and your own storefront.
16. No dependency on external RTL apps or scripts
What to check: does the Arabic experience depend on installing an app or subscribing to a service? Read the docs for required companions; on the demo, open the Network panel and look for scripts loading from domains that are neither the store nor Shopify.
Why it matters: an app dependency is a monthly cost and a single point of failure — pause the subscription and the storefront’s Arabic breaks. External scripts weigh on every page view, and Shopify’s Theme Store rules effectively prohibit them in themes anyway. The trade-offs are mapped in RTL app vs RTL-native theme.
What failure looks like: RTL that disappears when an app is paused or uninstalled; a licence check phoning an external server; third-party scripts in the waterfall.
How Tarz approaches these requirements
Tarz is our Arabic-first theme, and the sixteen criteria above are the standard it is built against. The table states, factually, how each one is handled — then run the same checks on it that you would run on anything else.
| Criterion | How Tarz handles it |
|---|---|
| 1 · Native RTL architecture | Designed right-to-left from the first line on Shopify’s Skeleton theme, with fully original code. There is no RTL switch — direction is the architecture. |
| 2 · Direction from the locale | dir is set on the document from the storefront locale; direction follows each customer’s active language, Arabic and English alike. |
| 3 · Logical CSS | Every rule is authored in CSS logical properties; no rtl.css exists, and the build fails if a physical property is committed. |
| 4 · Mixed-content bidi | Prices, SKUs, coupon codes, phone numbers and countdown digits are bidi-isolated; mixed Arabic–Latin fixtures are part of the theme’s own test standard, in both directions. |
| 5 · Mobile RTL | The same logical-property layout serves mobile; drawers, carousels and progress fills are keyed to the reading direction, and gallery thumbnail positions are logical sides. |
| 6 · Arabic locale | Arabic is the default locale, with English alongside for bilingual stores; every merchant-facing string goes through locale files. |
| 7 · Editor strings | The theme editor’s own schema strings ship in Arabic — sections, settings and help texts read natively. |
| 8 · Arabic typography | Letter-spacing locked to zero in Arabic contexts, no faux italics, script-aware base size and line-height. |
| 9 · Font loading | 53 licence-audited Arabic families, all self-hosted; only the families you select ever load. |
| 10 · Cash on delivery | Shopify’s standard product form with app blocks; the sticky add-to-cart submits the same form. EasySell and Releasit verified against the build with live test orders. |
| 11 · Regional payments | Original icons for Mada, STC Pay, Tabby, Tamara, Fawry and ValU alongside the global set. |
| 12 · Regional carriers | Aramex, SMSA and Bosta on the order-tracking page alongside global carriers, linking out to each carrier’s own tracking — never invented status. |
| 13 · Performance | All JavaScript ships inside the theme — no frameworks, no external requests — and only selected fonts load; measured against Shopify’s performance bar throughout development. |
| 14 · Accessibility | Full keyboard access with visible focus and contrast-checked colour schemes, tested against the Theme Store accessibility bar in both directions. |
| 15 · Theme Store compliance | Built to Theme Store requirements from day one; Tarz is currently in the Shopify Theme Store review and will be sold through the Theme Store. |
| 16 · External dependencies | None — no RTL app required, no CDN, no licence key, no phone-home. |
The complete fact sheet lives on the technical specifications page, counted from the packaged build; the merchant documentation is written in Arabic and English; the about page covers how Tarz is built and tested; and the changelog tracks version history and current status. Tarz spans 52 sections, 41 theme blocks and 16 templates. It is currently in the Shopify Theme Store review and not yet purchasable — we are not publishing a date we cannot hold; the planned launch price is $300, one time.