Shopify or a custom online store in Egypt: how to choose

"Should we use Shopify or build our own store?" is usually asked as a question about price. It is really a question about stage. A business testing whether people will buy online has different needs from one shipping hundreds of orders a week through three couriers. Shopify is the example here, but the reasoning applies to any hosted store builder with a monthly subscription.

What you pay on a hosted store builder

A hosted builder starts cheap and grows with you. There are three layers, and only the first is on the pricing page.

• The plan. A monthly or yearly subscription.
• Apps. Most stores add apps for reviews, translation, courier labels, WhatsApp notifications or invoices. Many are their own monthly subscription, and five or six of them can cost more than the plan.
• Transaction fees. The payment gateway takes its own percentage of each card payment. Shopify also adds its own transaction fee when you use a gateway other than Shopify Payments, which as of this writing is not offered to Egyptian merchants.

Fees and supported gateways change regularly, so check current pricing before you compare anything. The shape stays the same: cheap at ten orders a month, more expensive in absolute terms at a thousand.

What you pay for a custom store

A custom store reverses that shape. You pay an upfront build cost, then hosting, maintenance and the gateway's own fees. No platform takes a share of each sale, but someone has to build and maintain every feature you would otherwise install. That upfront cost buys nothing if nobody orders, which is why custom is rarely the right first step.

The Egyptian details that decide it

Cash on delivery

A large share of online orders in Egypt are paid in cash at the door. Hosted builders let you offer cash on delivery as a manual payment method, which is enough at the start. What they model less well is everything after: refusals, the courier holding your cash, and matching payouts to orders. More on that in building an online store in Egypt.

Local payment gateways

Egyptian gateways that accept local cards, mobile wallets and instalments vary in how well they plug into each platform. Some publish an official Shopify app; some support only some payment methods through it. Confirm with the gateway which methods work, how refunds are handled and how long settlement takes.

Arabic and right-to-left

Shopify and most major builders can serve an Arabic storefront, but the quality depends heavily on the theme. Check what customers actually touch: the menu, cart, checkout, confirmation messages, and product pages with mixed Arabic and English text. A theme that looks fine in its demo can mirror badly with your real products in it.

Courier integration

Creating shipments, printing labels and pulling delivery status back into the store saves your team hours a day. On a hosted builder this depends on whether your courier has a good app. On a custom store it is an integration built once against the courier's API.

Ownership and lock-in

On a hosted store you own your products, customers and orders, and can usually export them. You do not own the platform: the theme, apps and checkout logic stay behind if you leave. Moving later is a rebuild of the storefront, not a copy.

Two things protect you whichever way you go:

• Register the domain in your company's name, in an account you control.
• Test the data export early. Export products, customers and orders in the first month and open the files. If something is missing, find out now.

When each one makes sense

Start on a hosted builder when:

• You are still testing whether the product sells online
• Order volume is low and unpredictable
• One courier and one gateway are enough
• You want to launch in weeks, not months

Consider a custom store when:

• Plan, app and transaction fees together are a noticeable share of your margin
• You use several couriers and need one order status across all of them
• The store must connect to your stock, accounting or e-invoicing
• Your checkout or pricing rules do not fit what the platform allows

There is also a middle path: keep the hosted storefront and build a custom backend next to it for orders, couriers and reconciliation, often the cheapest way to fix the expensive part. Much of our API and backend work is this kind of job. The wider trade-off is covered in custom software vs off-the-shelf.

A simple decision checklist

Use real numbers from the last three months, not estimates.

1. How many orders do you ship per month?
2. What do you pay the platform per month, counting the plan, every app and transaction fees together?
3. What share of orders are cash on delivery, and how many are refused?
4. How many couriers do you use, and does each one integrate properly?
5. How many staff hours a week go into copying data between systems?
6. Does your Arabic checkout work on a real phone, start to finish?
7. Can you export all your data today?

If question 2 plus the cost of the hours in question 5 is heading towards what a build and its yearly maintenance would cost, get a quote. If it is nowhere near, stay where you are and spend the money on marketing.

If you reach that point, KF Tech Solutions builds custom online stores and web platforms for businesses in Egypt, including the order, courier and payment side. Tell us about your store, and we will say so if staying where you are is the better choice.

Common questions

Is Shopify available in Egypt?

Yes, you can run a Shopify store from Egypt and sell to Egyptian customers. The main limitation is payments: you use a third-party gateway instead of Shopify Payments, which affects fees and payment methods.

Can I offer cash on delivery on Shopify?

Yes, as a manual payment method. The limits appear later, in tracking which COD orders were delivered, refused and paid out by the courier.

Can I move from Shopify to a custom store later?

Yes. Products, customers and order history can be exported and imported. Make the old product URLs redirect to the new ones, or you lose their search rankings.