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Balqees

Running the web side of a honey brand across three Shopify storefronts — the UAE, the UK and Saudi Arabia.

Balqees
Role
Website Manager
Year
2023 – present
Services
Shopify development, migration, localisation, custom apps
Visit live site

The brief

Balqees sells honey from beekeeping cooperatives and artisan beekeepers through three Shopify stores: balqees.com (UAE), balqees.co.uk (UK) and sa.balqees.com (Saudi Arabia).

Each store has its own market and currency. The Saudi store is Arabic-first with an English layer, and all three need features Shopify doesn't ship with — loyalty, courier integration and bulk content moves between stores.

What I did

  • Launched the Saudi store's catalogue content from balqees.com: 184 metaobject entries and 1,261 product metafields across 78 products, with no dropped references.
  • Rebuilt the bilingual storefront: restored the Arabic translations from a full snapshot, then added an English /en layer of 2,489 values, each checked by reading it back — and removed 609 rows that were leaking English onto the Arabic store.
  • Built a Naqel courier integration: a paid order creates the air waybill, books the collection, attaches the label and syncs tracking every three hours, with cash on delivery supported.
  • Built a custom loyalty app for balqees.com: customers earn a point per 10 AED and redeem points as discount codes, synced with the Cubes loyalty platform.
  • Runs my own Shopify app, Collection Toolkit, on the Saudi store.

Stack

  • Shopify
  • Liquid
  • Kalles theme (customised)
  • Shopify Admin GraphQL API
  • Node.js + Express
  • PostgreSQL
  • Python
  • Vercel

Outcome

The Saudi store runs on the full balqees.com catalogue, Arabic by default with a clean English layer.

The loyalty app is live on balqees.com, and the Naqel integration is in final testing before it takes over Saudi shipping.