The links didn't disappear. Since 26 October, Shopify's checkout footer shows a single Terms and policies link instead of a row of separate ones, and clicking it opens a modal with your refund policy, privacy policy, terms of service, shipping policy and contact details stacked inside. So if a buyer in Dubai wants to know your return window before they tap Pay now, they open that one link and scroll. Everything you've published is still reachable. What changed is that the text is now read in a scroll-through overlay rather than on its own page, which means whatever you pasted into Shopify admin three years ago is suddenly a lot more visible.
The timing is awkward. White Friday traffic starts building through November, and this is the point in the year when first-time buyers who have never heard of your brand are deciding whether to trust you with an AED 600 order. We've gone through this modal on UAE stores over the past few weeks and the same three problems keep showing up: the refund policy doesn't say whether the refunded amount includes VAT, the COD terms live nowhere near the payment step, and the Arabic storefront shows an Arabic-labelled modal wrapping an entirely English policy.
Where the checkout terms and policies link pulls its text from
Settings → Policies in Shopify admin. That's it. There's no separate checkout-level copy, no theme file, no metafield. Whatever sits in those rich-text boxes is what renders inside the modal, on your footer policy pages, and in the policy links Shopify appends to order confirmation emails.
Two things worth knowing before you edit. First, Shopify offers template text for each policy. It is a starting point written for a generic merchant and it says almost nothing about UAE-specific realities like cash on delivery or courier return attempts. Plenty of stores published it unchanged on day one and never looked again. Second, the editor strips some pasted formatting. If you paste from Word or Google Docs you often end up with inline styles and stray dir attributes that look fine in English and break badly in Arabic. Paste as plain text, then rebuild the headings and lists inside the Shopify editor.
If you sell in both AED and SAR through Shopify Markets, note that the policy set is store-level. You get one refund policy, not one per market. Anything market-specific — a Saudi return address, a different COD fee, a different courier — has to be written into the single document as a clearly labelled section.
The Arabic version is probably not translated
Here is the thing that catches people out. Shopify translates the modal's own interface into Arabic. The heading, the tab labels, the close button, all of it switches with the buyer's locale. Your policy body does not, because it's merchant content, and merchant content only exists in the languages you've published translations for.
The result on an RTL storefront is a right-aligned Arabic frame containing eight paragraphs of English legal text. A buyer who switched to Arabic because they read Arabic more comfortably now hits a wall at the exact moment they're deciding whether to trust you. We see it on roughly half the bilingual UAE stores we audit, including ones where every product title and collection page was translated properly.
How to translate store policies into Arabic on Shopify
Translate & Adapt, Shopify's own translation app, handles policies. Install it, select Arabic as a published language, and policies appear in the content list alongside products, collections and theme strings. You can auto-translate them in a couple of clicks.
Don't ship the auto-translation unedited. Machine translation handles product descriptions acceptably and handles legal text badly, because legal text depends on precise terms — refund versus replacement versus store credit, working days versus calendar days, the difference between cancelling an order and returning a delivered one. Get the machine draft, then have a native Arabic speaker with some commercial reading edit it. For a standard set of five policies that's a few hours of work, and it is the cheapest trust signal you will buy all quarter.
After publishing, actually open the Arabic storefront, add something to cart, reach checkout and open the modal. Check that numerals, AED amounts and any email addresses render in the right direction. Mixed LTR strings inside RTL paragraphs are where the formatting falls apart, and you only catch it by looking.
Do you need bilingual policies for a Dubai Shopify store?
Legally, Arabic is the official language of the UAE and consumer-facing terms are expected to be available in it. If your trade licence is mainland and you're selling to UAE residents, publishing consumer terms in English only is a position we would not want to defend. Free-zone e-commerce licences don't change the consumer's rights.
Commercially the answer is simpler. If you've already built an Arabic storefront, an untranslated policy set makes it look half-finished, and shoppers notice half-finished. If you run English only and your traffic is overwhelmingly English-reading expat buyers, translating policies is still worth doing before you translate anything else, because policies are what a hesitant buyer reads. Product pages sell. Policies close.
VAT-inclusive refund wording, with the arithmetic
Advertised prices to UAE consumers include 5% VAT. Your checkout shows one number and the tax is baked into it. So when a customer reads your refund policy, the question they're answering is: do I get back the number I paid, or that number minus something?
Work a real one. Order: two items at AED 210 each, AED 20 shipping, AED 10 COD handling fee. Total collected AED 450. The customer returns one item. The AED 210 breaks down as AED 200 net and AED 10 VAT, because 210 ÷ 1.05 = 200. You refund the full AED 210 and reclaim the AED 10 of output VAT through your return in the usual way. If your policy says shipping and COD fees aren't refundable on partial returns, the customer keeps AED 240 of charges against one remaining item.
None of that is complicated. What matters is that your policy says it in plain words — something like: refunds are issued for the price paid, which includes VAT; original shipping charges and the cash-on-delivery handling fee are not refunded unless the item arrived damaged or incorrect. One sentence, and it removes the single most common pre-purchase support ticket we see on UAE stores.
What UAE rules actually require of a refund policy
There's no blanket EU-style 14-day right of withdrawal applied across all online sales here. What the consumer protection regime does require is that your terms are clear, shown before the purchase is completed, and honoured as written. Defective, misdescribed or non-conforming goods are a separate matter and your policy can't contract out of that. The practical implication: write a policy you can actually operate at festive volume, display it at checkout, and stick to it. A generous policy you quietly break during Eid rush does more damage than a tight one you keep. Have a UAE-qualified advisor review the final text — we build the checkout, we don't give legal advice.
COD terms need to appear before the payment step, not only in the modal
Cash on delivery is still a meaningful share of UAE orders and a larger one for first-time buyers. The terms that cause disputes are always the same four: whether there's a handling fee and how much, whether the courier accepts card on delivery or cash only, how many delivery attempts you make before the parcel comes back, and whether a refused COD order gets charged anything.
Put all four in the refund and shipping policies. Then put the fee somewhere the buyer cannot miss it. Shopify's manual payment methods let you rename the method and add a line of customer-facing detail at checkout, so the option can read Cash on Delivery with a note underneath stating the AED handling fee and that the courier collects cash only. That line does more work than three paragraphs inside the modal, because most people never open the modal.
If you want a tick-box acknowledgement on the checkout page itself, that needs checkout UI extensions, which means Shopify Plus. On a standard plan, put the acknowledgement on the cart page instead. It's not as clean, and it's enough.
Refunds through Tabby and Tamara
BNPL refunds go back to the provider, which then adjusts or cancels the remaining instalments. Customers don't always understand this and will ask why there's no money in their account. Add a line: refunds for orders paid through an instalment provider are returned to that provider, which updates your plan, and timing follows the provider's schedule rather than ours. Two sentences in Arabic and English, and your support queue gets shorter.
Riyadh is a separate audit
If you're also selling into Saudi Arabia, don't assume the UAE policy set transfers. VAT is 15%, so every inclusive-price example in your copy is wrong there. Arabic-first expectations are stronger. Return logistics run through different partners and your stated return window may not be achievable from a Dubai warehouse. Either maintain clearly separated sections in one document or run a second store. We've done both; the second store is more work and usually the right call once Saudi revenue passes a quarter of the total. Our Saudi Shopify work goes into the split in more detail.
A 40-minute audit you can run this week
- Open your store in Arabic, go to checkout, open the terms and policies link. Read what's actually in there, in Arabic, on a phone.
- Check each of the five policies for VAT-inclusive refund wording. Fix the ones that are silent.
- Confirm the COD fee appears on the payment method itself, not only in the policy text.
- Check your stated return window against what Aramex or your local courier actually delivers in December. If you promise seven days and the courier takes nine during White Friday, change the promise.
- Look for pasted HTML in the policy editor that breaks RTL rendering.
- Add the BNPL refund sentence.
Most of this is copywriting, not development. The parts that need a developer — the checkout acknowledgement, market-specific policy routing, Arabic RTL theme fixes — are a day or two of work, and worth booking before the last week of November when nobody sane deploys to checkout.
If you'd rather have someone else open the modal and tell you what's broken, that's what our free store audit covers, and the Dubai team runs it in both languages.