Tajer

Tajer is an e-commerce platform for Arab businesses selling internationally. I founded it and built it.

The problem it solves

An Arab merchant selling beyond their own country hits a set of problems that single-market platforms never model. Their customers read Arabic but their suppliers invoice in another language. They price in one currency and get paid in several. They ship domestically for some orders and internationally for others, with completely different cost structures and delivery expectations attached to each.

Most store builders assume one market, one currency, one shipping model, and a left-to-right interface. Every one of those assumptions has to be unpicked.

What makes it hard

• Arabic-first, genuinely. Not a translated skin over an English product. RTL layout, Arabic typography that doesn’t break cursive joins, Arabic search behaviour, and Latin runs sitting correctly inside Arabic text. Retrofitting this is far more expensive than designing for it, which is the main reason I now treat bilingual structure as an architecture question rather than a styling one.
• Multi-currency without lying about it. Displaying a converted price is easy; deciding which currency the order was actually denominated in, what rate applied, and what the merchant is owed is the hard part. Get it wrong and the merchant’s books disagree with the platform’s.
• Cross-border shipping as a first-class case, not an exception branch bolted onto domestic delivery.

How it’s built

A modular monolith with catalogue, orders, payments, and shipping as separate modules behind clear interfaces. Localization is a property of the data model — content, prices, and shipping rules are locale- and market-aware at the storage layer, not translated at render time.

Where this is relevant to you

If you are building for a market that the established platforms treat as an edge case, the work is mostly in refusing to inherit their assumptions. Bilingual structure, multi-currency accounting, and cross-border fulfilment are each cheap to design in and expensive to add later. This is the project that taught me which of those decisions are genuinely irreversible.