Executive summary
- What: Shopify improved right-to-left support for Arabic, Urdu, and Hebrew across the admin and storefront, including checkout, customer accounts, and the Horizon themes.
- Why: Right-to-left layout was the blocking defect in Middle East and South Asia expansion, forcing custom theme work or a separate regional build.
- Who: Brands selling into the Gulf, Israel, or Pakistan, and any organisation with operations staff who would rather work in Arabic, Urdu, or Hebrew than English.
What changed
Three right-to-left languages now have improved support on both sides of the platform. In the admin, staff can work in Arabic, Urdu, or Hebrew with the interface mirrored correctly. The same applies on the storefront, across the theme, checkout, and customer accounts, with the Horizon theme family covered.
Display language is resolved from the user's device settings where available, rather than from a manual selection. The chrome of the experience follows the device, while merchant-owned content stays in whichever languages you have published. Product titles, descriptions, metafield content, and policy pages do not translate themselves: you still publish those through Translate and Adapt or your own pipeline.
Practically, this separates layout from content. Shopify handles the mirroring, the directionality, and the interface strings. You remain responsible for the words that describe your products.
Why it matters
Right-to-left markets have been disproportionately expensive to serve on Shopify. The usual pattern was a forked theme with direction overrides, a stack of CSS exceptions that broke on every theme update, and a checkout that still read left to right at the moment of payment. That cost was recurring, and it rarely survived a platform upgrade cleanly.
Moving that work into the platform changes the expansion maths. A Gulf or Israeli market becomes a localisation project rather than a front-end rebuild, which usually means weeks rather than a quarter, and no bespoke theme to maintain. Checkout and customer accounts being included matters most here, since those were the surfaces teams could least easily patch. If you are scoping a market entry, our Shopify internationalization guide sets out how catalog, pricing, and language decisions interact.
The admin side is quieter but genuine. Organisations with warehouse, support, or merchandising staff in these regions can put those teams in their own language, reducing training time and the error rate on order edits and fulfilment.
Role-specific impact
- Marketers: Plan translation coverage deliberately. Layout support does not populate your catalog, so decide which collections, landing pages, and policies get human translation versus machine output, and budget accordingly.
- Developers: Audit existing direction overrides in your theme before enabling these languages, since legacy right-to-left CSS will fight the platform's native handling. Check custom app blocks and checkout UI extensions, which are not automatically mirrored.
- Store admins: Enable the languages under language settings, then assign staff accounts accordingly. Expect support tickets in the new languages and confirm helpdesk routing can handle them before announcing availability.
Use-case example
Real-world scenario
A specialty food brand on Shopify Plus sells into the UAE through an English storefront and converts at roughly half its North American rate. Previous Arabic quotes came back near 40,000 dollars, because the work meant forking the theme and hand-patching checkout. With native right-to-left support, the team instead enables Arabic, runs the top 200 SKUs and the full policy set through professional translation, and leaves the long tail on machine output for a later pass. The storefront ships in five weeks on the standard Horizon theme, and there is no forked theme to re-patch at the next upgrade.
Implementation checklist
- Audit your theme for existing right-to-left overrides and remove them before enabling the languages, so custom CSS does not conflict with native handling.
- Enable Arabic, Urdu, or Hebrew in your admin language settings for the markets you actually serve.
- Test checkout, customer accounts, and any checkout UI extensions in each language. Extensions and custom app blocks need their own review.
- Translate your policy, shipping, and returns pages first, since these carry the most legal and support weight.
- Prioritise catalog translation by revenue contribution rather than full coverage at launch.
- Verify transactional email and SMS templates render correctly, and confirm helpdesk staffing for the new languages.
FAQ
Q: Does enabling Arabic translate our product catalog automatically?
A: No. Shopify handles the interface, layout direction, checkout, and customer accounts. Merchant-owned content such as product titles and descriptions only appears in a language once you publish translations for it, through Translate and Adapt or your own pipeline.
Q: Will our custom checkout UI extensions mirror correctly?
A: Do not assume so. Native support covers Shopify's own surfaces and the Horizon themes. Any extension or app block you built or installed needs its own right-to-left testing, and that is the most common gap we find in these launches.
Resources
Shopify's guidance on localization and translation covers activating languages and publishing translated content.
Need guidance? Talk to Makro.