Available for select freelance work
Create an online store.
Starting a store is mostly a sequence of decisions, and the expensive ones come first: which platform, how the catalogue is structured, what happens at checkout. Get those right and the build is straightforward. Get them wrong and you pay to redo the store a year later.
Egypt & the Gulf · Remote
- 150+storefronts built and launched
- 4e-commerce platforms worked on
- #1GitHub contributor in Egypt, 2023
What you get
The platform decision, honestly
Salla, Zid, WooCommerce or Shopify — chosen from your catalogue size, your payment and shipping needs and who on your team will run it daily, not from whichever one I prefer to build on.
A store built, not a template switched on
Your branding applied across every template, the catalogue structured so search and filters work, and the pages a first-time buyer checks before trusting you: shipping, returns, contact, about.
Payment, shipping and the boring parts
Local gateways wired and tested with a real transaction, shipping rules that reflect what you actually charge, tax settings, and order emails that don't land in spam.
Handed over so you can run it
A walkthrough of the dashboard for whoever will use it, written notes for the parts people forget, and analytics installed correctly so month two is measurable.
The decisions that cost the most, made first
Almost nobody rebuilds a store because of the design
Stores get rebuilt because a decision made in week one stopped fitting in month twelve. The catalogue was structured around the twenty products that existed rather than the two hundred that arrived. The platform could not take the payment method that turned out to matter. Categories were named the way the business thinks rather than the way customers search.
None of those are visible on launch day, which is exactly why they are worth arguing about before it.
Saudi and Egypt are different problems
For customers in Saudi or the Gulf, Salla and Zid usually win, and not because of features: they handle local payment and shipping natively, and they put a checkout in front of your buyer that they have already used elsewhere. Familiarity at the payment step is worth more than most features you could add.
In Egypt the calculation changes — different payment options, different cost structure, cash on delivery carrying real weight — and WooCommerce or Shopify often fits better. Selling into the Gulf from Egypt on Salla or Zid is also a deliberate strategy rather than a workaround, and it is worth naming as one.
What actually delays a launch
Rarely the build. Almost always the content: product photography that was going to be done later, descriptions nobody was assigned to write, and a shipping policy that had never been decided because it had never been asked about. A store can be technically finished and sit unpublished for a month waiting on a folder of images.
So those get asked about at the start, in writing, as part of the work rather than as a surprise in week three.
Common questions
The things people actually ask before hiring.
- Which platform should I choose in Saudi Arabia?
- Usually Salla or Zid. Both are Saudi, both handle local payment and shipping natively, and both are what your customers already recognise at checkout. The choice between them comes down to your catalogue and your team, and I will say which I'd pick for your case and why.
- And in Egypt?
- More often WooCommerce or Shopify, because local payment options and the cost structure differ. Salla and Zid still work for Egyptian sellers aiming at Gulf customers — which is a real strategy, not a workaround.
- How long does it take to launch?
- A focused store with a normal catalogue is usually two to four weeks from decision to live. What stretches it is almost always content — product photography and descriptions — not the build.
- What do I need to have ready before we start?
- Your products with prices and photos, a logo or the intent to make one, a domain, and the commercial details — shipping rates, return policy, who answers customer messages. Everything else can be decided as we go.
Related services
Tell me what you're building.
Describe the problem rather than the spec. You'll get an honest read on the shortest path to solving it — including whether I'm the right person for it.