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Sep 18, 20266 min read

What does an online store in Iraq actually cost?

H
Hussein
Roowaj Team
What does an online store in Iraq actually cost?

The question arrives in different words but it is always the same one: how much money do I need before I can start? The answer depends on which of three roads you take.

Road one: build it from scratch

Here you pay for four separate things before you sell a single item: a developer, hosting, a domain and design work. The developer is a one-off but the largest; hosting and the domain come back every year; design comes back every time you want to change something. And the work does not end at handover — every later change, a new field on the order form, a different page layout, a bug, needs that person again or someone like them.

This road makes sense if you know exactly what you want and have the budget to wait. It makes no sense if what you actually want to find out first is whether selling online suits you at all.

Road two: stay on chat alone

This road looks free, and that is the trick. Its cost is real, it just never appears on an invoice:

  • Your time. Every order that goes through DMs needs a chain of replies: how much, do you have it in that size, send me your address, confirm. Multiply those minutes by your orders a day, then by thirty days. What comes out is a salary you never collect.
  • The orders that slip away. The customer who asks at eleven at night and gets no answer until morning does not always wait.
  • The mistakes. Wrong size, half an address, an order for something that had run out. Each one is either a return or a customer who does not come back.
  • The customers you cannot reach. After five hundred sales in DMs, the names and numbers of everyone who bought from you are buried in conversations you cannot search. When you launch something new, there is no way back to them except paying for another ad that goes looking for strangers.
    • The real cost of selling over chat alone is not what you pay. It is what you never accumulate: a list of customers you can message any time, for free.

    Road three: a ready-made platform

    On Roowaj you pay nothing during the trial period: no subscription fee, no credit card, no contract. And no commission on orders — Roowaj takes no cut of your sales, however large they get. The number of orders is unlimited, and so is the number of product images.

    Your store gets a free link of the form yourstore.roowaj.com, with a name you choose. No hosting to buy, no domain to renew, no developer to wait for.

    The only cost left is your own time the first time round: a photo, a price and a name for each product. A merchant starting with ten products finishes a shareable store in one sitting.

    What you do not get, so you know before you start

  • No online payment gateway. Roowaj does not take the money on your behalf. Your customer pays the way the two of you agreed — cash on delivery or a direct transfer — and you then mark the order paid in the dashboard.
  • No custom domain yet. Your link stays yourstore.roowaj.com until custom domains ship.
  • No delivery service. Delivery stays with your own courier or whichever company you already use.

    • If any one of those three is a hard requirement for your business right now, it is better to know it before you spend the time, not after.

    The bottom line

    The cheapest way to start is not the one with no invoice. It is the one that stops the bleeding you cannot see: hours spent answering the same question, orders that arrive incomplete, and customers you have no way of reaching again.

    Open your store on [Roowaj](https://roowaj.com) for free, and put the link in your Instagram bio today.

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