If you're starting from zero in the UAE, sell on the marketplaces first. Amazon.ae and noon hand you buyers who are already searching with a card in hand, and their commissions, painful as they look, are usually cheaper than what it costs to send paid traffic to a brand-new website. Build your own store once you have proof that people reorder, or when your margin structure genuinely can't survive a 15% referral fee. That's the short version; the rest of this article is the fee tables and the margin math behind it.
We help UAE businesses set up all three channels, and the most expensive mistake we see isn't picking the wrong marketplace. It's spending tens of thousands of dirhams on a beautiful Shopify build before anyone has proven a single product sells here.
What Amazon.ae and noon actually take from each sale
Both marketplaces charge a referral fee, a percentage of the sale price, per item sold. On Amazon.ae, published referral fees run from 5% to 16% depending on category, with a minimum of AED 1 per item: mobile phones sit at 5%, consumer electronics at 7%, apparel at 15%, per Amazon's own rate card. Amazon has also been waiving the Professional account monthly subscription for UAE sellers "for a limited time"; worth checking whether that's still the case when you register, because promotional pricing has a way of quietly ending.
noon's structure is similar, with referral fees by category and the same AED 1 minimum per item. Its published tables put mobiles around 5–6% and most mid-range categories in the 14–15% band, while fashion has historically carried noon's heaviest commissions, well above what electronics sellers pay. noon refreshed its entire fee schedule in September 2026, so read the current table for your exact subcategory rather than a blog post's summary (including this one).
Then comes fulfilment. If the platform stores and ships your stock (FBA on Amazon, FBN on noon), you pay per unit shipped. The two are now almost identical on paper: a small envelope costs AED 5.5–7.5 to fulfil on either platform, a standard parcel under a kilo roughly AED 8.5–10.5, with fees climbing past AED 40 for genuinely oversized items. Storage runs AED 2 per cubic foot per month at Amazon and AED 1.75 at noon. If instead you ship noon orders yourself through their Directship option, budget AED 12–14 per small parcel, which quietly destroys the economics of anything cheap.
One line worth memorising from both fee tables: fees are charged per unit, every time, forever. A 15% commission plus AED 9 fulfilment on an AED 60 product is not a marketing cost you optimise away later. It's the permanent shape of your margin on that channel.
What "just build your own website" really costs
The software is the cheap part. Shopify's Basic plan is USD 29 a month on annual billing (USD 39 month-to-month) as of mid-2026, call it AED 107–143. Add a domain, a decent theme, maybe a few apps, and you're still under AED 300 a month before anyone customises anything. A professionally built store in Dubai is another matter; we've covered what different budgets buy in our website design cost breakdown, and e-commerce builds sit at the upper end of every range in it.
Payments are where UAE sellers get a surprise. Shopify Payments isn't available to UAE-registered businesses, so you'll connect a local gateway: Telr publishes 2.49% + AED 0.50 per domestic transaction with a monthly fee of AED 99–349 depending on plan, Stripe UAE charges 2.9% + AED 1 with no monthly fee, and PayTabs, Network International and Tap all land in the same 2.4–2.9% neighbourhood. Because you're on a third-party gateway, Shopify then adds its own 2% surcharge on the Basic plan (1% on Grow). Stack it up and card payments on a small Shopify store cost you roughly 4.5–5% of every sale, before delivery.
That still beats a 15% referral fee, and this is where the website looks like the obvious winner. It isn't, yet.
The number missing from that calculation is traffic. Amazon and noon charge their commission partly because they bring the customer. On your own store, you are the traffic department, and in the UAE that means paid media until your brand or SEO matures. We've published real numbers on what a Google Ads click costs in the UAE, and for a new e-commerce store it's entirely normal for customer acquisition to consume 15–30% of first-purchase revenue. On the first order, your "commission-free" website often pays a higher effective commission than noon charges. You just pay it to Meta and Google instead.
The website wins on the second order. Repeat purchases from your email list, WhatsApp broadcasts and returning direct traffic carry almost no acquisition cost, and that's the entire strategic argument for owning a store: it's a repeat-purchase machine, not a cheap-fees machine. (It's also the only channel where you keep the customer's contact details. Marketplace buyers belong to the marketplace.)
The licence question, before any of this
None of the above is available without a UAE trade licence whose activity actually covers trading. noon's seller documentation is explicit: a trade licence authorising trading, selling or e-commerce, a company bank account (personal accounts are rejected), Emirates ID or passport, and either a VAT certificate or a declared non-VAT status. Amazon.ae's requirements are equivalent in practice.
Two traps catch first-time sellers. Service-only licences don't pass noon's review, however impressive the company name. And Dubai's cheap e-Trader licence, the one everyone recommends for selling on Instagram, has generally restricted physical-goods trading to UAE and GCC nationals; we've unpacked that in our e-Trader licence guide. An expat planning to sell products typically needs a freezone or mainland e-commerce licence, which changes the startup budget by a few thousand dirhams a year. Licensing rules shift, so confirm the current position before you commit to stock.
The margin math on an AED 100 sale
Here's the honest per-order comparison for a typical AED 100 product in a mid-commission category, using the published fees above.
On a marketplace with platform fulfilment: AED 14–16 referral fee, AED 8–11 fulfilment, a dirham or two of storage amortised per unit. You keep roughly AED 72–77 before product cost, and the customer arrived free.
On your own Shopify store: roughly AED 5 in payment and platform fees, plus delivery via a courier you've negotiated yourself, plus marketing. If acquiring the buyer cost you AED 20 of ad spend (optimistic for a new store), you keep less than the marketplace left you. If it's a returning customer who came from your WhatsApp list, you keep AED 85+ and it's not close.
That asymmetry is the whole answer. Marketplaces are efficient at first orders; your own store is efficient at every order after that. Selling a product people buy once a year? The marketplaces' fee tables are simply your cost of doing business. Selling something with genuine reorder behaviour — skincare, supplements, coffee, pet food — the store earns its keep fast.
Worth adding: Dubai Chamber projected the UAE e-commerce market would reach USD 9.2 billion by 2026, and both platforms have spent accordingly on logistics. Buyers here expect next-day delivery and easy COD. Matching that experience alone, as a solo store, is harder than any fee table suggests.
So which one, in practice
Our default recommendation, and it annoys people who've already commissioned a website: start on one marketplace, not two, and pick it by category. Electronics and internationally recognised brands tend to do their volume on Amazon.ae; noon has strong pull with Arabic-speaking shoppers and runs aggressive campaign moments like White Friday. Get profitable there, learn your true return rate and fulfilment cost, then add the second marketplace; the listings work transfers almost one-to-one.
Build the store in parallel only once something is selling, and build it lean: a conversion-focused build with a working checkout beats a brand showcase. Its first job is catching the repeat buyers, the WhatsApp enquiries and the people who Google your brand after seeing it on noon, not replacing the marketplaces.
And if you're doing meaningful volume on all three channels, the fee tables stop being the interesting question. Inventory sync, response times and where your next thousand customers come from — that's the real work.
If you want a second pair of eyes on your numbers before you commit to stock, a store build or a marketplace launch, talk to us. We'll tell you which channel your margins can actually afford.