How much does it cost to start dropshipping grocery in the GCC?

The store is the cheap part and almost nobody budgets for the expensive part. A Shopify plan, a domain and a theme come to very little; the real cost is buying the first thousand visitors and discovering what fraction of them convert.

Where the money actually goes

Budget in three buckets rather than one: the shopfront, the traffic to test it, and the reserve for refunds and chargebacks on orders the supplier will not take back. The third bucket is the one that closes stores, because it is spent after the revenue is booked.

Dropshipping trades margin for not holding stock, and the trade only works while traffic is cheap. For a grocery or food store in the GCC, the answer turns on one thing in particular: Grocery margins are thin and baskets are large, so the whole model lives or dies on delivery cost per order.

What is different about the GCC

The GCC is not one market. Payment habits, delivery norms and language expectations differ enough that a single approach underperforms in at least one country.

Payment preference varies by country more than most planning assumes.

What is different about a grocery or food store

The part nobody plans for is returns: if the supplier will not take one back, the store is the returns department.

Where a mobile app comes into it

Weekly reordering is the behaviour, and an app that remembers the last basket removes most of the work.