Does Shopify support Arabic?

Tarz guides · August 2026

Yes. Shopify supports Arabic as a storefront language, translates its checkout itself, and lets you run multi-language, multi-currency markets. What Shopify does not provide is the theme layer: right-to-left layout, Arabic interface strings and Arabic typography all come from the theme you install — and that is the part merchants usually discover last.

What does Shopify provide for Arabic out of the box?

More than most merchants expect. Arabic is a supported storefront language: in the Shopify admin, under Settings → Languages, you add Arabic, publish it, and it can be your store's default. Shoppers then browse your storefront in Arabic like any other published language.

Translation of your content is covered too. Shopify's free Translate & Adapt app translates what you sell — product titles and descriptions, collections, pages, policies — and lets you adapt the wording per market rather than shipping one translation everywhere.

Checkout is Shopify's own territory. Because checkout is hosted and rendered by Shopify, Shopify translates it itself: an Arabic-speaking shopper reaches an Arabic checkout without the theme, or any app, being involved. And Shopify Markets handles the commercial side — grouping countries, assigning languages to each market and selling in local currencies.

If you are starting from zero, our guide on how to set up an Arabic Shopify store walks through the admin side in order.

Why does an Arabic storefront still depend on the theme?

Because the storefront a shopper actually sees is rendered by the theme, and Online Store 2.0 themes control their own layout direction. Shopify tells the theme which locale is active; what the theme does with that information is the theme's business. A well-built theme reads the locale and sets dir on the document, so the whole layout runs right-to-left. A theme that never planned for Arabic simply pours Arabic text into a left-to-right design.

Interface strings are the second gap. Your products and pages are your content, and Translate & Adapt can carry them into Arabic. But the storefront's own vocabulary — add to cart, view cart, search, sold out, pagination, form errors — ships inside the theme as locale files. A theme with no Arabic locale leaves every one of those strings for you to translate by hand, and commerce vocabulary translated string by string rarely reads like a shop.

Typography is the third gap, and the least visible until you see it. Arabic is a connected script: the letter-spacing that gives Latin type an airy, premium feel physically pulls Arabic letterforms apart. Faux italics distort them. Base sizes tuned for Latin render Arabic too small. None of this is Shopify's to fix, because type systems ship inside themes — we cover which families hold up in Arabic fonts for Shopify.

There are smaller gaps in the same family: prices, SKUs and discount codes are inherently left-to-right strings that need bidi isolation inside right-to-left text, directional icons need to mirror while symmetric ones stay put, and carousels need to move with the reading direction. All of it lives in theme markup and theme CSS. The full list is in the Shopify RTL checklist.

Are Shopify's free themes ready for Arabic?

No. Shopify's free themes are designed left-to-right and do not ship an Arabic locale. Right-to-left layout has been a long-running request from Arabic-speaking merchants; for now, you can force direction with custom CSS or an app, but the typography and the interface language remain your problem. That is not a criticism of the free themes — it is a statement of what they were built for.

How do merchants close the theme gap?

Three routes, in ascending order of how much of the problem they actually solve.

An RTL app on top of a Latin theme

A translation app handles the strings while an RTL app injects CSS overrides at runtime to mirror the layout. It works, within limits: coverage extends to whatever the app author has patched, a theme update can un-mirror what worked yesterday, and the fee is monthly for as long as the store lives. As a way to test Arabic demand on a theme you already own, it is defensible.

A theme tagged “right-to-left”

Some themes carry a right-to-left feature tag. These are typically Latin designs mirrored with a bundled override stylesheet, and they usually ship no Arabic locale — so the storefront is right-aligned while the buttons stay English. One-time pricing, but the translation work and the typography questions come home with you.

An RTL-native theme

A theme authored for right-to-left from the start: direction read from the storefront locale, layout in CSS logical properties rather than an override file, an Arabic locale in the box and a type system built for the script. Direction is not a mode this kind of theme switches into; it is how the theme is written. We weigh the app route against this one, cost and coverage, in RTL app vs RTL-native theme.

How Tarz answers the theme layer

Tarz is an Arabic-first, RTL-native Shopify theme, built on Shopify's Skeleton theme with fully original code. Direction is read from the storefront locale and set on the document, and the layout is authored in CSS logical properties throughout — there is no rtl.css file in the codebase, so no component can fall out of sync in Arabic.

Arabic ships as the default locale with English alongside it, including the theme editor's own schema strings — the person setting up the store works in Arabic instead of guessing at English section names. The type library holds 53 licence-audited Arabic font families with letter-spacing locked to zero in Arabic contexts; body and heading pickers are separate, so the theme can never suggest a decorative face for long-form reading, and only the families you select are ever loaded.

The regional layer is built in rather than delegated to apps: original payment badges for Mada, STC Pay, Tabby, Tamara, Fawry and ValU; a standard product form with app-block support, verified with live test orders through the cash-on-delivery apps EasySell and Releasit; and Aramex, SMSA and Bosta on the order-tracking page. The packaged build is 52 sections, 41 theme blocks and 16 templates.

Tarz is in final development and will go through Shopify's theme review before listing — we are not publishing a date we cannot hold. The planned launch price is $300, one time, through the Shopify Theme Store, updates included. Join the waitlist to get one email on the day it goes live.

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