Custom RTL Shopify Store for a Middle Eastern Fashion & Accessories Brand

Introduction

We collaborated with a Middle Eastern ready-to-wear fashion brand to create a Shopify storefront that honours cultural authenticity while delivering modern, scalable commerce capabilities. Built entirely from scratch, the platform was designed to support both Saudi (KSA) and international audiences, balancing localisation, merchandising flexibility, and operational integrations.

The Challenge

A regional fashion brand specialising in thobes, shemaghs, ghutras, footwear, and accessories needed a fully localised Shopify experience for KSA and international markets. The project required complex variant logic, RTL bilingual support, promotional merchandising, and backend integrations - beyond the capabilities of pre-built themes or off-the-shelf apps.

The Solution

The store was developed on a fully custom Shopify theme architecture, supporting domain and country-specific storefronts for regional and global customers. A bilingual English-Arabic language switcher was implemented with full RTL (right-to-left) adaptation, ensuring seamless navigation and a culturally aligned UX across markets.

— Building a store for both KSA and international customers required deep localisation and flexible merchandising. The new Shopify platform handles Arabic RTL perfectly, supports our complex product logic, and gives our team powerful tools to manage promotions and product data. It finally feels like our ecommerce platform is built for our market.”

Navigation & UX Experience

To accommodate diverse product lines - from thobes to footwear - we designed a custom mega-menu featuring:

• Multi-level category structures
• Integrated promotional blocks
• Dedicated “Shop by Offers” navigation
• Mobile-optimised behaviour
• Sticky header functionality

This structure improves discovery while enabling promotional storytelling directly within navigation.

Product Page Experience

Given the product diversity, we implemented highly flexible PDP logic:

• Dynamic size selection with content updates based on product type
• Length selection where applicable
• Multiple size guide layouts tailored to specific categories
• Image gallery slider with zoom
• Promotional badges driven by tags/metafields (e.g., “Buy 2 for X”)
• Dynamic cross-sell and product recommendations

This ensures each product type delivers a tailored buying experience.

Promotions & Pricing

Promotional infrastructure includes:

• Multi-buy offers (e.g., Buy 2 for X)
• Visibility across PLP, PDP, and cart
• Global Sale Mode configurable via the theme customizer

This allows the brand to activate storewide campaigns instantly without development support.

Customer Accounts

We built a comprehensive customer account system featuring:

• Sign-in, registration, and password recovery
• Logged-in vs logged-out state handling
• Account dashboard and landing page
• Profile management (personal info, password)
• Address book functionality
• Validation and error handling

Orders functionality includes:

• Orders list page with status indicators
• Order reference and date visibility
• Detailed order breakdown pages
• Order history tracking
• Integration with a third-party OMS for operational synchronisation

Wishlist

Customers can save items directly from product cards, with wishlist persistence inside their accounts and a dedicated wishlist page for easy access.

Payments & Checkout

We implemented Shopify’s secure native checkout, enhanced with region-based checkout logic to ensure localised payment and processing compatibility and to validate workflows.

Store Locator

A Stockist-powered store locator bridges digital and physical retail, offering:

• Location filtering
• Embedded maps
• Store-level details

Compliance & Tracking

The store includes a cookie consent framework with granular preference management (required, analytics, marketing) and governed analytics/marketing script deployment.

Email Experience

We redesigned and implemented custom email templates aligned with the brand’s visual identity, ensuring consistency across transactional and lifecycle communications.

Airtable Integration (Custom Build)

To support merchandising and operational workflows, we developed a custom Airtable integration featuring:

• Automated Shopify ↔ Airtable data synchronisation
• Structured product data mapping
• Secure API-based connections
• Error handling and validation logic
• Scalable architecture for future extensions

This integration reduces manual data handling while enabling flexible backend management.

The Results

The storefront now provides a culturally aligned yet globally scalable shopping experience, supporting bilingual browsing, regional merchandising, and complex apparel sizing logic. Integrated OMS connectivity and Airtable automation improved operational efficiency, while flexible promotion tooling and Global Sales Mode empowered internal teams to launch campaigns instantly, accelerating go-to-market speed across KSA and international regions.