7 min read
The most common mistake in e-commerce projects is taking a flow designed for another market and using it as-is. International templates typically assume three things: the customer will pay by card, will type an address in a standard format, and shipping will be handed to a carrier. In Erbil — and in Iraq generally — none of these three assumptions is automatically true.
Payment: cash on delivery still leads
Most online purchases in the region are completed with cash on delivery. That has concrete consequences for whoever builds the system. An order must count as “confirmed” before payment is taken, which means stock has to be reserved at order time rather than at payment time. Refusal at the door is also more common than with card payments, and the system needs to record it as a distinct state — otherwise revenue reports will not reflect reality.
- Cash on delivery: stock is reserved at order time, payment is recorded on delivery.
- Card / digital wallet: payment clears immediately and refunds follow a different path.
- Bank transfer: the order must sit in a “awaiting payment” state until confirmed.
- Refusal at the door: report it as its own state, not as a cancellation.
Address: directions, not a street name
A standard address form (street, number, postcode) is often left blank or filled in incorrectly here. In practice the customer gives directions: “Ankawa, second block after the Dream City entrance, opposite the market.” So instead of forcing a structured, mandatory address, offering a free-text directions field and an option to drop a location pin raises delivery success.
- Provide a free-text “directions” field; do not require a postcode.
- Accept a map pin or a shared location link.
- Make the phone number mandatory — in practice delivery is completed by phone.
Delivery: zone-based fees and your own courier
Many businesses deliver with their own team or with contracted motorcycle couriers. That calls for a zone-based fee table and courier assignment rather than a carrier integration. Free within Ankawa and the centre, a flat fee for outlying districts — a setup like this is clear for the customer and manageable for the business.
WhatsApp is the main channel, not an add-on
Even when the order is completed on the site, confirmation, clarifying the address and delivery updates usually happen over WhatsApp. Rather than treating this as an extra feature, it should be considered part of the flow. Otherwise part of the order lives in the system and part in the chat, and by month-end it becomes unclear which orders were actually delivered.
- The order number must be identical on the site and in the WhatsApp message.
- Changes agreed in chat (address, items) must be written back to the system.
- Delivery confirmation belongs in one place; do not keep two separate records.
A multilingual storefront and currency
Making the storefront work in Kurdish, Arabic and English is not only text translation: whether the price shows in IQD or USD, the number format and the text direction (RTL) all change together. Translating a product name while leaving the price format untouched is one of the quietest causes of lost trust.
A short checklist
These points may look involved, but each one only needs to be defined correctly once during setup and then it runs by itself. What is genuinely hard is going back and changing them after the system is live.
- Are the payment methods the ones actually used, or did they come from a template?
- Does the address field match how addressing really works here?
- Can the delivery fee be defined per zone?
- Is the WhatsApp flow tied to the order record, or does it stand apart?
- Do price, currency and text direction change together with the language?