Conversion-Led UX & Wireframes
Wireframes for home, collection, product, cart and checkout drawn from your own session recordings, site-search logs and support tickets. Not a template library.
Dubai, UAE
Shopify Store Design & Development in Dubai
A Dubai storefront has to mirror properly in Arabic, sell without a postal code, and stop treating cash on delivery as the default.
Delivered remotely for brands across Dubai and United Arab Emirates.
Build · Dubai
Why Dubai brands come to us for this
- One storefront in two directions: Arabic and English mirrored across navigation, filters, cart, invoices and email
- Apps vetted for right-to-left behaviour before installation, because a single widget can break the Arabic layout
- Address and shipping logic built for UAE reality — no mandatory postal code, building-and-area entry, courier-ready output
- Checkout weighted toward cards, wallets and regional instalments so cash on delivery stops being the default choice
- Category templates for modest fashion, fragrance and jewellery: made-to-measure inputs, discovery sets, rate-linked pricing
Almost every Dubai store we open has the same two structural faults, and neither is cosmetic. The Arabic side is a translation layer draped over a theme that was never built to flip direction, so the moment a shopper switches language the grid stops reading right, the cart drawer opens from the wrong edge, and the filter labels stay in English. And the checkout treats cash on delivery as the normal path, which quietly decides the rest of your business: refused deliveries, cash handled twice, no card on file, and a customer you cannot build a retention programme around.
We build both directions as one storefront rather than a primary and a translation. That means navigation, facets, badges, carousels, form fields, invoices and transactional email all mirror, and it means the Arabic path gets QA'd on real devices instead of assumed to work because a translate app reports full coverage. Third-party apps are where this breaks — a review widget or a size-chart app injecting its own left-to-right markup will undo a week of theme work, so app selection becomes a design decision here, not an afterthought.
Then the catalogue. The categories Dubai actually produces each break a stock theme in their own way. An abaya or modest-fashion line needs made-to-measure inputs, fabric and drape detail and length options structured as real variants and metafields. Fragrance and oud need discovery sets and decants merchandised as the entry point, because nobody buys a AED 600 attar blind. Fine jewellery needs pricing that can follow the metal rate and fraud rules that do not decline your best orders. We design the templates around the category rather than asking the category to survive a template.
Local context
Building for a market with no postal codes and a Hijri calendar
Two things about a UAE build catch teams who have only shipped for US or European stores. The first is address entry: the UAE has no functioning postal code system, so a required ZIP field, a postcode-driven rate table or an address validator built for five-digit codes will cost you orders every day. Dubai addresses arrive as building name, area, landmark and sometimes a Makani number, and the checkout and the courier handoff both have to accept that shape. The second is the calendar. The retail year here runs October through April, the summer sees a real population dip as residents travel, and Ramadan reorders buying hours so completely that traffic peaks after Iftar and again well past midnight. We scope builds to land before the season opens, not into it, and we make sure the promotional and shipping-cutoff controls your team will need through Ramadan and Eid are theme-editor switches rather than developer tickets.
Scope
What Design & Build includes
The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Dubai brand’s realities.
Full service detailCustom Online Store 2.0 Theme
A bespoke theme in clean, commented Liquid with modular sections your team can rearrange themselves. Zero dependency on page-builder apps.
Merchandising & Navigation System
Collection architecture, filtering, badging and cross-sell rules mapped to how your catalogue actually sells. Bestsellers surface; dead stock stops eating grid space.
Speed Budget & Core Web Vitals
Image pipeline, third-party script audit and app cleanup enforced against a hard budget: LCP under 2.5s on 4G mobile, CLS under 0.1, INP under 200ms.
Catalogue & Content Load
Products, variants, metafields, collection copy and redirects loaded and QA'd in a dev store before cutover. You review a real store, not a Figma file.
Launch, Handover & Documentation
Loom walkthroughs, a written theme guide and 30 days of post-launch fixes included. Your team owns the store from day one.
Scoped and quoted for your Dubai store
We do not work off a rate card. Every Dubai engagement starts with a fixed statement of work — named deliverables, named dates, one number — written after we have looked at your store, not before. If a smaller first step would serve you better, we will say so.
Get this scopedHow it runs
From kickoff to results
Discovery & Data Pull
Two weeks inside your analytics, heatmaps, site search and support inbox. We leave with a ranked list of what is currently costing you revenue.
Architecture & Wireframes
Sitemap, template inventory and grey-box wireframes for every page type. Signed off before a single pixel gets designed.
Design System
Figma component library, type scale and every awkward state: empty cart, sold out, pre-order, bundle, back-in-stock, subscription upsell.
Build & QA
Liquid development in a dev store, tested on real devices and against your live app stack. Accessibility checked to WCAG 2.1 AA.
Launch & Measure
Redirect map, tracking validation, DNS cutover on a low-traffic window. Then 30 days of monitoring against the pre-launch baseline.
Proof
Design & Build results
Anonymised under NDA. Figures pulled from the client’s own analytics.
Performance Apparel (DTC)
~$6M/yr DTC, 900+ SKUs across size and colour variants, US · Shopify Plus
Returns ran at 31% and refund cost consumed the entire paid media margin. One size chart image served 40 different fits, and 62% of add-to-carts started on a collection page that never showed variant availability. The named constraint: no new product photography budget, so every fix had to come out of the existing asset library and the review corpus.
+29%sitewide conversion rate1.71% to 2.21%, five-month average
+14%average order value$84 to $96 once the threshold bar and cross-sell shipped
31% → 22%return ratenine-point drop, roughly $310k/yr in recovered margin
1.9x → 2.4xblended MERwith paid spend held flat throughout
Home Goods & Furniture
~$11M/yr, 2,300 SKUs, configurable upholstery, US · Shopify Plus + Hydrogen storefront (Oxygen)
Fabric, leg and size options turned 2,300 SKUs into more than 40,000 variant permutations, and the Liquid theme rendered a configurable PDP in 6.9 seconds on mobile. Collection filtering ran client-side, so 40% of shoppers left before the first product painted. The named constraint: the ERP stayed. It was the single source of truth for stock and lead times and was not up for replacement.
6.9s → 1.4smobile LCP75th-percentile field data on configurable PDPs
+64%CVR on configurable products0.44% to 0.72%. Sitewide conversion rate rose 23%
+52%organic sessionsserver-rendered facets made 1,900 filter combinations indexable for the first time
+$2.4Mincremental annualized revenuemonth-8 run rate vs. the pre-build baseline
In their words
Clients on this work
AOV $58 → $79
“Full rebuild in 11 weeks, launched two days before Black Friday, which was an aggressive ask and probably a stupid one on my part. They pushed back hard on three homepage ideas I was attached to and were right about all three. AOV went from $58 to $79, mostly off the bundle builder they put on the product page.”
CEOHome fragrance brand, ~$6M/yr · Phoenix, AZ
Verified via Shopify Partner referralFAQ
Design & Build in Dubai — your questions
Yes, and it is far cheaper than retrofitting. Building bilingual from the start means every string lives in a translation key rather than hard-coded in a section file, and it means the layout gets designed knowing it has to mirror. Retrofitting a live store is mostly archaeology — hunting hard-coded English left behind by previous developers across every template and app block.
As structured product data, not as a note field. Length, sleeve, cuff, fabric and lining become real variants or line-item properties so the order that reaches your tailor is unambiguous and the customer sees a price that reflects their choices. We also build the measurement guidance into the page in both languages, because the single biggest driver of returns in this category is a customer guessing at a length.
Partly. Design decides how visible and how trustworthy the prepaid options look, and that moves the number. The rest is commercial: a modest prepayment incentive, wallets and instalment options presented properly at checkout, and tracking communication good enough that the second order does not need COD to feel safe. We treat the COD share as a figure you are deliberately reducing rather than a fixed feature of the market.
No. ConversionEX is in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and we hold no UAE trade licence, mainland or free zone, and no staff in the Emirates. We work with Dubai brands remotely, with calls in your evening from around 7pm and everything else run asynchronously. Anything that legally requires a licensed local entity is not work we can take.
Eight to twelve weeks for most brands, from kickoff to live. A single-catalogue store with clean product data lands closer to eight. Add subscriptions, B2B, or a multi-market rollout and you are looking at fourteen to eighteen. We give you a dated Gantt in week one and update it weekly.
We build on Shopify's Dawn reference theme and replace the sections we need. That gives you Shopify's own performance and accessibility baseline plus a codebase that survives platform updates. Premium themes carry code you will never use and cannot safely delete.
That is the point. Every content block is a native theme section with a schema your merchandiser can configure in the theme editor. You get a written guide and recorded walkthroughs. If you still need us for a homepage change, we built it wrong.
Next step
Design & Build for your Dubai brand.
Thirty minutes with the strategist who would actually run your account. We screen-share your store, read your data live, and tell you the three highest-value things we can see from the outside.
Shopify or Shopify Plus stores doing $150k/mo or moreFounder, CEO or eCommerce lead on the callNo deck and no pitch — we open your store instead
Prefer to write it out? [email protected] gets a real reply the same business day, Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm MT.