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Sabaa Beauty on working with Dazzle Commerce
A Gulf skincare brand invisible in the language most of its customers search in, losing money at the door on cash-on-delivery refusals. Shams Al-Gharbi on discovering those were the same problem.
SA
Reviewed by Shams Al-Gharbi
Managing Director, Sabaa Beauty
SECTOR
Beauty & Cosmetics
PLATFORM
Noon & Amazon
MARKET
Gulf, UAE & MENA
ENGAGEMENT
Three quarters, ongoing
Strong products, and product pages that read as though they had been written somewhere else.
EXPERT VIEW
“We thought we had an Arabic site. We had an Arabic menu. Once the product pages were actually written in Arabic, people started paying up front without being asked to.”
Shams Al-Gharbi · Managing Director, Sabaa Beauty
Published with the client’s approval following the engagement review. This line also appears on the Sabaa Beauty case study.
- Before the call
Why they went looking for an agency
Two problems that each looked like somebody else’s department.
“We ranked for almost nothing in Arabic, which is the language most of our customers search in.”
And far too much of our revenue arrived as cash on delivery, where a meaningful share was refused at the door and came back to us as a cost rather than a sale. Marketing owned the first problem and operations owned the second, so between us we owned neither.
The site had an Arabic toggle that had been added late. It translated the navigation and left the product content, the checkout and the support pages in English. We had told ourselves that was a phase one.
An Arabic toggle over an English catalogue. Search engines had almost nothing to index, and shoppers had little reason to trust it.
- First
What they had already tried
One shortcut and one surcharge, neither of which touched the cause.
“We machine-translated the product catalogue, which produced Arabic that any native speaker can tell was not written by one.”
Then we added a surcharge on cash on delivery to push people towards card. It reduced orders. It did not reduce refusals, because the customers refusing at the door were not price-sensitive — they were uncertain, and we had just given them another reason to be.
- Onboarding
The first ninety days, from their side
Research done in the language rather than translated into it.
Arabic keyword research built from scratch, not converted from the English list it had always been derived from.
“The keyword work was done in Arabic rather than translated from the English list, which sounds like a small distinction and is not.”
They came back with a body of demand we had never seen, for products we already sell, described in words we had never used. Shoppers search skincare in Arabic using terms that do not appear anywhere in a translated English keyword set, and we had been building a content plan against a list that could not contain them.
In parallel they segmented the refusal data, which is where the second half of the story came from.
- The finding
What surprised them
The language problem and the payment problem were one problem.
“Refusal rates were highest exactly where the experience was weakest — Arabic-language sessions, first-time customers.”
People were choosing cash on delivery because they were not sure about us, and they were not sure about us because the site stopped speaking their language at the point where it started asking for money. Put like that it is obvious. It was not obvious when the two numbers lived in two different reports owned by two different teams.
We never removed cash on delivery. We just stopped being the kind of store where you would want it.
Refusals concentrated among first-time, Arabic-language customers — the same group the half-translated site served worst.
- Outcome
What changed
Measured across three quarters. Revenue counts kept orders only — on a Gulf account, counting placed orders overstates almost everything.
2.4x
Organic revenue
Arabic and English combined
+38pt
Prepaid share
Moved away from cash on delivery
-26%
COD refusal rate
On orders still placed as cash on delivery
12 wks
To payback
On the engagement fee
- Their advice
What they would tell another brand considering us
Offered as advice to a peer rather than praise for us.
“Ask whether the keyword research will be done in the language or translated into it.”
Ours had always been translated, which is precisely why we had never found the demand that was sitting there. If you sell in a market where your customers search in a language your team does not write in, that one question separates the agencies who can help you from the ones who will produce a very tidy plan for the wrong market.
- The criticism
What they would change
Every review on this site carries one of these. We publish them unedited.
“Rebuilding right-to-left properly was a larger development job than either of us budgeted for.”
Not just text direction — the filters, the cart and the checkout all had to be rebuilt at template level, and for about six weeks that work was the thing everything else was waiting on. I would want it scoped and priced as its own project rather than folded into a search engagement, because as a line item inside an SEO retainer it was permanently competing with the work we had actually hired them for.
- In summary
Rated highest, rated lowest
No stars. Reviews of our own business, hosted on our own site, are not independent and we are not going to dress them up as though they were.
RATED HIGHEST
Native-language research rather than translated research, and the honesty to explain that the two are not the same thing. They also connected two numbers that our own org chart had kept apart.
RATED LOWEST
Scoping of the right-to-left development work. It should have been its own project with its own budget, not a line inside a search engagement.
- The work behind this review
What actually ran on this account
Four service lines, one team, one plan. Each links to how we run that service generally.
The full methodology, the baseline, the sequencing and what we would do differently.
Native Arabic keyword research and the content plan it produced — the change that mattered most here.
Right-to-left rebuilt at template level, including the filters, cart and checkout that had been breaking.
Noon and Amazon listings brought into the same language and trust standard as the store.
How we work in markets where cash on delivery and language trust decide the economics.
- More client stories
Other engagements, in their own words
Reviews are being published one at a time. Where a review is not live yet, the case study is the fuller account.
CLIENT REVIEW
An appliance brand competing against its own resellers, where the returns and the price war shared a cause.
CLIENT REVIEW
A US cookware brand whose revenue grew while profit stayed flat, and where the money was actually going.
ALL REVIEWS
Every quote we publish, each sitting next to the work that produced it.
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