Having a successful abaya store does not automatically mean that the next step is opening an online shop.

You might have a good location, customers who know the store and return to it, and a collection that moves excellently within the branch. Selling online could indeed be a real opportunity to reach customers outside your city and make better use of the inventory you already have.

But between these two possibilities lies a question more important than: Should I open an online abaya store?

The question is: What will change in your business if a customer can buy from you without ever entering your store?

This is the question from which it is worth starting your feasibility study.

Do not start by calculating the cost of the store

When a business owner searches for the cost of creating an online store, it is natural to start with the numbers: subscription, design, photography, shipping, packaging, marketing—but this is not the only cost that must be calculated.

Let's assume you have an abaya store in Riyadh. Today, most of your sales are tied to whoever can reach the branch. You have inventory, suppliers or production, employees, proven products, and perhaps already a customer base that knows you.

Opening an online channel does not mean you are starting a new abaya business from scratch. You are trying to make an existing business capable of selling in a different way.

So before you ask How much will the store cost me? ask:

What do I already have, and what do I need to add so that this business becomes sellable online? The difference between the two questions is huge.

You already have half of what someone starting from scratch is looking for

Someone starting a new abaya business still has many questions: What will they sell? Where will they get the products? Which designs does the market demand? How to price? And what will make the customer trust them? An established store owner has bypassed part of these questions through experience.

You have real data, even if it is not saved in a dashboard: you know which abayas move faster, which sizes are highly requested, which designs stay on the shelf, the questions customers ask before buying, and the periods when demand increases.

This knowledge has value.

That is why a feasibility study for the online expansion of an existing abaya store should not treat the business as if it were starting from scratch, but rather ask how we can turn what the store has learned into an experience that can work beyond its geographical boundaries.

Test the feasibility from four angles

Instead of a long file full of projections that are difficult to prove, you can conduct a simpler initial test.

1. Is there demand that your store cannot serve today?

Start with what is already happening.

Do you get inquiries from cities where you do not have branches? Do customers ask you on Instagram about shipping options? Do you have followers from outside your city? Are there customers who know the brand but reaching the branch is not practical for them?

The existence of these signs does not guarantee the success of the online store, but it tells you that there is demand currently hitting physical boundaries.

And here, the value of the store becomes clear: not because it is on the internet, but because it removes a barrier that was preventing some customers from buying.

2. Are your products purchasable without trying them on in-store?

An abaya is a visual product, but it is not just a picture.

A customer holding an abaya in the store can see the fabric, movement, length, and details, try on the size, and then ask the employee directly. Online, the product page must do part of this work.

This means readiness is not measured by the number of abayas you can upload to the store, but by your ability to present each one clearly: good photos, an understandable description, sizes and lengths, fabric and cut details, available options, and a clear return and exchange policy.

From our interviews with abaya merchants, sizes, images, video, and clarifying the differences in cuts between models emerged as crucial elements in the online sales experience.

The question here is: can someone who has not seen these products in front of them make a purchase decision?

3. Can your operations handle a second sales channel?

Here appears a point often overlooked by many calculations in abaya business feasibility studies.

An online store does not live separately from the physical shop.

If the last piece of a certain size is sold in the branch, will it still appear available for purchase online? Who will prepare the order? Who updates the inventory? Where will returns go? And will you have a unified inventory or inventory dedicated to each channel?

The faster the inventory moves and the more sizes and models vary, the more important these questions become.

Therefore, it is not enough to have potential demand; you also need operations that can handle this demand without turning the new channel into manual extra work and new chaos.

4. Are the order economics logical?

Do not just look at the price of the abaya, subtract its cost, and consider the rest as profit from online sales.

An order may carry costs for packaging, electronic payment, shipping, marketing, return or exchange, and operational time to prepare it and serve the customer.

So instead of the general question: How much does it cost to open an online abaya store?

Start with a more useful question: How much does it cost me to acquire and fulfill an online order, and how much is left for me from it?

You can build a simple initial calculation:

Order value − Product cost − Order fulfillment cost − Customer acquisition cost = Approximate margin

You do not need to project a whole year of sales at the beginning. You need to know if the economic unit of the order itself makes enough sense to be worth testing.

Before opening a new branch... do you really need it?

When an abaya store succeeds and its owner starts thinking about expansion, a second branch seems like a natural step: a new location, a new neighborhood, and perhaps a new city. But a new branch does not just expand sales; it replicates a large part of the infrastructure you needed for the first branch: rent, fit-out, employees, operations, and inventory, and then waiting for the new location to build its foot traffic and customer base.

An online store offers a different way to expand. Instead of moving your business to a new geographic location to reach new customers, you make your products themselves accessible and purchasable from more places. This does not mean that an online store has no cost or that it is a better alternative to a physical branch in all cases, but it allows you to test an important question before committing to a larger expansion: Is there demand for my brand outside the scope my store serves today?

Imagine, for example, that you have an abaya store in Riyadh, and you constantly receive inquiries and orders from Jeddah, Dammam, and other cities. Opening a branch in every city is a huge bet, whereas online selling gives you a chance to see where the demand actually is before deciding where to invest later. You might discover that a certain city has become a major market for you, or that most of the demand comes from areas that were not even on your plan.

Here, the value of the online store changes: it is not just another branch on the internet, but a tool for expansion and market testing at the same time. It can expand the scope of sales without forcing you to replicate the entire branch model in every market you want to reach.

A new branch requires you to choose the market first and then invest in it. An online store can help you see where the demand is before you decide where your next investment will be.

This does not eliminate the value of physical branches. Data might later prove that opening a branch in a specific city is indeed the right step. The difference is that you are then not making the decision based solely on intuition; you have real, readable demand.

Do not ask: Does online sell more?

In our interviews with merchants in the sector, one of the most interesting observations came from a merchant who started with a physical branch and later moved to online selling: the value of the transition was not simply that (online sells more).

The value was in being present where the customer moves.

This is an important point because comparing the sales of the shop with the sales of the online store in the first month might lead you to a wrong decision. A shop that has been operating for years has a known location, a customer base, and stable buying behavior. A new online store needs time to build similar traffic around it.

So the better question is not: Which of the two channels will sell more?

But rather: Does the presence of both channels together make your business capable of serving demand that it could not serve before?

Try expanding before betting on it

You do not need to transition all your operations in one day.

Start with a specific selection of abayas that you know very well, prepare their pages as if the customer will not be able to ask you any questions before buying, define how to handle inventory, orders, shipping, and returns, and then open the path for the first group of customers.

If you have an audience on Instagram or a customer base for the physical store, you already have a place from which you can invite people to try it.

Then observe.

Not just the number of visits, but what happens between them and the order: What products do people view? Where do they stop? What questions are still reaching you? What sizes are moving? And what is causing exchanges or returns?

The first version of your store is not supposed to prove that the expansion will succeed. It is supposed to give you better information to make the next decision.

And when is online expansion not the priority?

If your inventory itself is unorganized, product information is unclear, you do not know your costs and margins, or you cannot fulfill current orders in a stable manner, then adding a new channel might not be the first problem you need to solve.

This is not a judgment that e-commerce does not suit your business.

Rather, it means there is a problem that takes precedence over it.

Sometimes the best result of a feasibility study is not "start" or "do not start," but:

This is the thing we need to fix before we start.

From the physical store to the first online order

If you find that you have demand that exceeds the limits of the branch, products that can be clearly presented, operations that can manage orders, and economics that seem logical, you do not need to build the biggest store in the sector after that.

You need the first testable version.

Start with the right products, organize their information and sizes, set payment, shipping, and return/exchange policies, and then create your store on Salla and link the new channel to what you already have instead of building a separate business from it.

For those who want to organize the steps from the idea to the first order, they can refer to the E-commerce Starter Guide.

And if a large part of your orders already comes through messages, read also: From Instagram and WhatsApp to an Abaya Store: When Does Manual Selling Become a Barrier to Growth?

Because the question in the end is not whether every abaya store should turn into an online store.

The question is: