Cash on delivery, WhatsApp as the real checkout, two currencies with a rate you control, and a catalogue that opens on a weak signal — what an online shop here actually needs, and what it does not.
Bilal Malass
Author
Every few months someone in Tripoli or Minieh asks me to build them "a website like Amazon." What they almost always need is something much smaller, and the gap between those two things is where most of the money gets wasted.
Here is what actually matters when you sell online from Lebanon, in the order it matters.
Start here, because everything else follows from it.
The default assumption in every e-commerce tutorial is that a customer arrives, fills a basket, types a card number, and leaves. In Lebanon that sequence usually breaks at step three. Cash on delivery is still how a very large share of orders are paid, card payment is not the reflex it is elsewhere, and getting a merchant account as a small business here means paperwork and waiting.
So a shop built around a card form is a shop with a locked front door. The checkout has to treat cash on delivery as a first-class path — recorded properly, visible in your dashboard with its payment state, markable as paid when the money actually arrives — rather than as a checkbox someone added at the end.
The second thing tutorials get wrong: they treat "contact us to order" as a failure state.
Here it is often the conversion. People want to confirm with a person before money moves — check the item is really in stock, ask when it will arrive, negotiate a little. A form cannot do any of that, and a customer who wanted to ask something and could not will simply not order.
The build that works: the basket lives on the website, and the confirm button opens WhatsApp with the order already written out. Nothing is retyped, nothing is misheard, and the conversation you were going to have anyway now starts with the details already agreed.
This is not a compromise. It is a shorter path to a sale than a payment gateway for most of the businesses I work with.
A shop here may need to show US dollars, Lebanese pounds, or both — and the rate you charge is not always the rate any exchange API reports.
That means the rate belongs in your admin panel, as a number you set, not fetched from a service that will confidently overwrite your shelf price at three in the morning. It sounds like a small thing. It is the single most common reason a Lebanese shop on a generic platform ends up with prices its owner did not choose.
Most of your customers are on a phone, on mobile data, and often on a weak signal. Every megabyte you send is a chance for them to give up.
This is where the technical choices stop being abstract. Server-rendered pages arrive as finished HTML instead of as a program the phone downloads and runs. Product images get compressed and sized for the screen they land on rather than served at whatever resolution the camera produced. A 4 MB hero photo is not a design decision; it is a customer walking out.
If you want the longer version of that argument, it is the one I make on the Akkar page — the areas with the weakest connections are exactly where a heavy site stops working entirely.
"I already sell on Instagram, why do I need a site?"
Because they are not the same tool. Instagram is discovery — it is where people find you and where the photos live. A website is where somebody can see everything you sell at two in the morning without messaging anyone, where prices and stock are stated once instead of answered forty times, and where Google can find you at all.
They work together. The site becomes the catalogue you link from your bio, and orders can still finish in a WhatsApp conversation. You are not replacing what works; you are giving it somewhere to point.
If you are starting out, resist the full platform. The version that earns its money on day one is usually:
That is a smaller build than most people expect, it can be live in weeks rather than months, and it can grow into a payment gateway and accounts later without being rebuilt.
I wrote up the full scope, the process and the things that actually move the price on the e-commerce website page. If you are in the North and want to talk it through in person, I am in Minieh and in Tripoli regularly.