Do you need Arabic on a UAE ecommerce store?

For a meaningful share of the market, yes. A large part of the audience is comfortable in English and a large part is not, and the second group is the one competitors ignore.

In more detail

It is not a translation job. Right-to-left changes layout, iconography and reading order, and a store that flips the text without flipping the structure reads as machine-translated, which costs more trust than the English-only version would have.

What to do about it

Arabic is not a translation job. A right-to-left screen reads in a different order, so the layout changes and not only the words.

Phone-first is not a trend here, it is the default. A store that works badly on a phone works badly.

Delivery expectations in the UAE are set by same-day services, and a store shipping in five days is judged against that.

The mobile app angle

Both of TicApp’s most-used builds are bilingual and priced in AED, with the layout rebuilt for right-to-left rather than mirrored.