Saudi ecommerce peaks around Ramadan and Eid, White Friday in November, Saudi Founding Day in February and National Day in September. Start Shopify campaign work four to six weeks before each: build the landing page and offers, test discounts and bundles, load-test the theme and apps, and confirm mada, Apple Pay and BNPL work under real traffic.
The Saudi ecommerce calendar
- Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr: the largest season. Shopping shifts late into the evening, and gifting and food categories spike. Dates move about eleven days earlier each year with the Hijri calendar.
- Eid al-Adha: a second gifting and fashion peak roughly ten weeks after Eid al-Fitr.
- White Friday: the regional name for Black Friday, running across late November, with many stores extending it into a week.
- Saudi Founding Day (22 February) and Saudi National Day (23 September): patriotic themes, green branding and national-day offers.
- Back to school in August, and the 11.11 and 12.12 sales, which have grown with marketplace competition.
What a campaign build includes
- A campaign landing page in Arabic and English, built as a Shopify template so it can be reused next season.
- Offer logic: automatic discounts, bundles, tiered spend-and-save, and free-shipping thresholds.
- Countdown and stock messaging that is true, not decorative.
- Gift options for Ramadan and Eid: gift wrap, gift messages and delivery date selection.
- Tracking: campaign UTM links, conversion events and a simple daily report.
A six-week timeline
- Six weeks out: agree offers and margins, choose hero products, brief creative.
- Four weeks out: build landing pages and discount logic on a duplicate theme.
- Three weeks out: test checkout end to end with mada, Apple Pay, Tabby and Tamara; check ZATCA invoices on discounted orders.
- Two weeks out: speed and load check; remove apps that slow the theme.
- One week out: publish teaser pages and email and SMS capture; freeze non-urgent changes.
- Launch: monitor payments and stock hourly on day one.
Do not install new apps during campaign week. Most peak-day outages we see come from an app added a few days earlier.
Checkout under load
Shopify's platform handles traffic spikes well. The weak points are the theme and third-party apps, especially apps that inject scripts into every page, and payment gateway or BNPL limits. Ask your gateway about peak-day authorisation capacity, and remove or defer anything that slows the product page on mobile.
