Across many emerging markets in the region, interest in website design and building digital stores keeps rising among entrepreneurs and small businesses, despite the obstacles they face. According to data from Aftership, a specialized e-commerce platform, in some of these smaller markets the number of e-stores in 2025 was only around 146, a modest figure that reflects the early stage of the digital journey in economies worn down by years of war. Even where launching such stores went unlicensed for a long time, e-commerce still pushed into the market, driven by hard living conditions and high unemployment that led many people, especially the young and women working from home, to start online selling as a source of income. This reality produced two kinds of platforms. The first leans on social networks and commission-based marketing with limited resources. The second has appeared more recently, backed by larger traders and by markets opening up to foreign goods such as products from the Chinese platform Shein. New as the experience is, it has shown real appetite among local consumers for online shopping and product variety, running into obstacles of trust and infrastructure, most of all the absence of legislation and weak electronic payment systems.
Reality of E-commerce Stores in Emerging Markets and Their Challenges
In many of these markets, digital infrastructure stays modest after years of war, which weighs directly on the ability of small businesses to build an effective digital presence. Internet penetration is estimated at only about 35.8% of the population in some of them, with low connection speeds that average around 4 Mbps on fixed lines. Limited reach like this means the local e-commerce audience is still relatively small, and many small businesses find their main audience through social media rather than independent websites. Facebook and Instagram pages have in fact become parallel digital markets across the region, including in Lebanon, where entrepreneurs sell their products directly without the cost of building a website. This flexibility let many home-based and micro businesses get started, but it came with fierce competition and worries about product quality and seller reliability. Online shopping in these markets also runs into major logistical obstacles. With no reliable local payment gateways, most transactions depend on cash on delivery or on intermediaries who ask for advance transfers, which weakens consumer trust and limits how far digital commerce spreads. Despite these difficulties, the experience of recent years shows that these markets have gradually warmed to the idea of online shopping. Young people who got used to buying clothes and electronics online, even when it meant waiting weeks for shipping, helped spread a new shopping culture. The absence of regulatory legislation did not stop e-commerce from growing on its own, but it keeps that growth limited and shadowed by risks tied to the rights of consumers and sellers alike.
On the other side, local and regional initiatives have come up to close some of the gaps. In Lebanon, which shares with many of these markets the same struggles with infrastructure and weak trust in platforms, banks have offered solutions that make it easier for small businesses to step into e-commerce. Bank of Beirut, for instance, launched an e-commerce platform that lets merchants set up their digital store with little effort and accept card payments locally and internationally straight into their accounts. The platform drew a large number of startups and charities in Lebanon during the COVID crisis and let them collect their revenue safely and in an orderly way without needing deep technical skills. Solutions like these show that financial innovation can support small projects in tough environments like the ones these countries live through. In many of these markets, local banking alternatives are still very limited, but the Lebanese case may hold useful lessons. Adopting simple, secure electronic payment methods, together with the banking sector or fintech companies, can raise trust in e-commerce and encourage more small businesses to build their own websites instead of relying only on social platforms.
Comparison with Saudi Arabia and Lebanon: Where Do Emerging Markets Stand?
Setting the scene in these emerging markets next to Saudi Arabia and Lebanon brings out sharp contrasts that show how much the economic and regulatory environment matters. Saudi Arabia is a regional success story in adopting e-commerce at scale. The value of its e-commerce market reached about $16.75 billion in 2023, with annual growth approaching 18%. That rise comes from clear government support and a set of initiatives under Vision 2030 to grow the digital economy. In 2025, for example, the Kingdom launched an initiative through the Saudi E-commerce Council to hand 650 free e-stores to micro and small companies, meant to nudge them into digital commerce and lower the technical and financial barriers in front of them. The initiative, run with an Italian software company, only asks that the business be Saudi and small and that it has no existing store. These steps show how Saudi Arabia managed to fold startups into digital transformation and made e-commerce a basic part of even the smallest businesses.
Lebanon, for its part, has digitally experienced people and high internet usage, yet its recent economic crisis held back institutional e-commerce. Estimates put the size of the Lebanese e-commerce market at no more than $60 million in 2023, a very modest figure that reflects falling purchasing power and weak investment in the field. Lebanon saw a temporary boom in online shopping during the COVID pandemic in 2020 and after, when necessity pushed many young people to start online selling as a response to economic collapse and unemployment. But that boom leaned almost entirely on social media platforms and cash on delivery, with no legal or regulatory base to organize e-commerce. So the Lebanese experience stays two-sided. On one side, it proved that small businesses can adapt quickly by moving to digital selling as a way to survive. On the other, it laid bare the urgent need for government support to improve infrastructure, such as internet networks and logistics services, and to pass laws that protect consumers and regulate the market. Without that support, e-commerce stays an appealing but difficult option, which closely mirrors the current situation in many of these markets.
In the end, it is clear that small businesses in these markets stand at a digital crossroads. On one side they have the example of prosperous Saudi Arabia, where electronic payment is widespread and the infrastructure is joined up, so any new store can reach a wide audience at home and abroad. On the other they see in Lebanon a picture closer to their own reality, where individual and youth initiatives drove digital growth amid weak official support. Closing the gap calls for measures on several levels: building local payment and delivery services, updating legal frameworks to protect electronic transactions, and spreading a culture of trust in online shopping among the public. With economic sanctions easing somewhat and some commercial openness returning, these markets have a chance to learn from regional experiences and avoid the mistakes others made. In the end, designing a website or a digital store is more than a technological luxury for a small business. It can become a lifeline that widens its markets beyond narrow local borders and gives it the ability to compete in an age of fast-moving digital economy.