Online shops for Lebanese retailers.

Shopify, if your requirements are ordinary and your catalogue is large — standard cart behaviour, hundreds of products, apps for couriers, staff managing it without a developer. A custom build earns its cost when the selling logic is unusual: spec filtering, quoting instead of checkout, wholesale alongside retail, WhatsApp ordering, or speed a theme full of apps won't reach. We sell the custom option and will still tell you when it is the wrong one.

Decide which one you will honour when somebody pays, say so on the page, and calculate the other from a single stored rate rather than typing fixed numbers into every product. Then updating one value corrects the entire catalogue instead of an afternoon of edits. Round the converted figure so it looks like a price rather than a calculation.

If the build stores local prices as fixed numbers, all of them become wrong that day and someone edits them by hand. If it calculates from one rate held in one place, you change that number and the shop is correct again. This is decided when the site is built, so it is worth raising on the first call.

Sometimes, and it depends on your bank and commercial registration rather than your preference. A merchant account through a local processor or a local wallet are the realistic routes; Stripe does not operate here. This is covered properly on the Lebanon page, and it is worth settling before a checkout is designed rather than after.

Show availability only as precisely as you can genuinely maintain — in stock, low, made to order — and make marking something unavailable a ten-second job from a phone. For scarce or one-off items, confirm before taking payment. A rough number that is true is far better than an exact number that stopped being true two weeks ago.

Only if you already have it or your volume genuinely demands it. Building the site as though you have an ERP when you don't produces a stock figure that is fiction within a fortnight, which is worse than showing no figure, because customers believe it.

Shown by area before checkout, not revealed at the final step. Delivery to Beirut, to Tripoli and to a village are genuinely different costs, and a flat rate either overcharges most people or loses money on the rest. Surprising someone on the last screen is the most expensive moment to do it.

So the form should not insist on one. An address step that accepts how people actually describe where they live, plus a phone number the courier will use anyway, works. Demanding a street number and postal code produces either abandoned carts or invented data.

For most Lebanese shops, yes, and it should look like a real option rather than a grudging fallback. A significant share of buyers prefer it, and hiding it below a card form reads as a shop that would rather they paid another way.

Between $1,000 and $2,000 for most custom builds, fixed price in US dollars after one short call. A large catalogue, wholesale pricing tiers or spec-level filtering pushes it above that and is quoted individually. If Shopify is the better answer we will say so, and that costs you a platform subscription instead.

Yes, and it is one of the clearest cases for a custom build. Buyers of technical goods shop on the numbers — dimensions, output, compatibility, rating — and filtering on those is exactly what a general-purpose theme handles badly. The catalogue in our concept work was built around precisely this.

That depends on decisions made early: image handling, how much runs in the browser, and whether filtering re-requests the page or happens instantly. A shop assembled from a theme plus a dozen apps is slow almost by construction. Page weight matters more here than in markets with better connectivity — there is a linked piece on that below.