Arabic-first commerce: what real RTL support looks like

Plenty of app builders will tell you they “support RTL.” What that usually means: the text alignment flips, and everything else breaks quietly. Chevrons point the wrong way. The layout mirrors except for the four places it doesn’t.

We built StoreToNative with Arabic commerce as a first-class requirement from the first commit, and it taught us that real right-to-left support is a hundred small decisions, not a switch.

Layout is the easy part — direction is everywhere else

When an Arabic shopper opens a StoreToNative app, every native screen mirrors: navigation, product grids, the cart, sheets and dialogs, back gestures. (The payment page is your store’s own, so it follows your site’s direction.) The details are where it shows. A “next” chevron in an English app points right; in Arabic it must point left — so every directional icon in the storefront resolves against the text direction instead of being hardcoded. Sort and filter sheets open from the correct edge. Progress steps run the correct way.

Numerals: read either way

Prices show in Western digits (0–9) today. Where Arabic-Indic digits (٠١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩) matter most in a shopping app is input: a shopper on an Arabic keypad types them into a phone number or a price filter, and an app that rejects them feels broken. StoreToNative reads them correctly in both places.

Arabic out of the box

Shopper-facing strings — navigation labels, cart, checkout, order status, empty states — ship in Arabic and English, and you choose which one your app speaks. Your product data comes from your WooCommerce store in whatever language you maintain it.

Why we care this much

E-commerce in the Middle East is enormous and mobile-first, and it has been served for years by tools that treat Arabic as an afterthought. We think the first impression an Arabic-speaking customer gets from your app is a competitive weapon. It’s also, frankly, an engineering standard: a codebase disciplined enough to get RTL right everywhere is disciplined about everything else too.

Your customers will notice. Start the 14-day trial and open your own catalog in Arabic.