800website is a Dubai web design agency. We have built stores for Creabites, a creatine supplement brand, and ChickenWay, a restaurant in Beirut taking orders online. These are the features that mattered.
What are the key features of a good e-commerce website?
Eight, in order of impact on revenue: real product photography, guest checkout, visible delivery cost and time, product descriptions written for search, a working search function, trust signals near the buy button, a phone or WhatsApp contact, and a fast mobile experience.
Notice what is not on that list: animations, a clever hero video, an AI chatbot. Those are the things stores spend money on and they move revenue far less than getting the eight above right.
The single biggest lever is photography, and it is the one clients most often skip. A product shot taken properly against a clean background, showing scale and detail, outsells a supplier-provided image every time. If your budget is tight, spend it on photography before design.
Why is my online store getting traffic but no sales?
Five causes, and you can usually identify which one from your own analytics. Checkout friction — forcing account creation before purchase loses a large share of buyers. Hidden delivery cost — a shipping charge revealed at the final step is the classic abandonment trigger. No trust signals — no address, no phone, no return policy, no named reviews. Wrong traffic — visitors arriving on informational searches who were never going to buy. Mobile problems — a checkout that works on desktop and breaks on a phone.
Diagnose it properly rather than guessing. In GA4, look at where people leave: if they reach checkout and stop, it is friction or cost. If they never reach the cart, it is the product page or the traffic.
One thing worth checking before anything else: submit your own contact form and place a test order. We have audited stores where the form had never delivered a single enquiry, and the owner had assumed demand was simply low.
Do I need a search function?
If you sell more than roughly twenty products, yes. Visitors who use site search convert at several times the rate of those who browse, because they arrive knowing what they want.
What matters is that it tolerates mistakes — plurals, misspellings, and the words your customers use rather than the words on your product labels. If someone searching “trainers” finds nothing because you called them “running shoes”, that is a lost sale created by vocabulary.
Below twenty products, clear category navigation does the job and search adds little.
What does this cost to build?
A store on our Business package is AED 3,500 for up to six pages in 14 days; Premium is AED 6,999 for ten-plus pages including product subpages, in 21 days. Payment integration — connecting and testing Stripe or a local UAE gateway — is AED 2,500. Premium hosting is AED 2,400 a year.
A realistic small store lands around AED 11,900 in year one and AED 2,400 plus maintenance after. Product description writing is AED 250 per page if you want them written for search rather than copied from the supplier sheet.
More on e-commerce development in Dubai, the published packages, or full cost breakdown.
Talk to us
800website is a Dubai web design and development agency with published fixed prices. Send the details and you get a fixed scope and a fixed price back — no hourly billing. Contact us, message us on WhatsApp, or call +971 58 578 5380.
