Tabby Review (2026): What It Actually Costs a Saudi Business to Offer It
lkwjd EditorialAugust 12, 202613 min read
LK
lkwjd EditorialIndependent software and payments reviews for Saudi and MENA businesses
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Key Takeaways
Tabby does not publish a merchant rate. It publishes the shape of the bill only: a variable commission set by your industry and business profile, plus a small fixed fee on every successful order, with payment gateway charges already included. The percentage itself appears for the first time in your contract.
The payout mechanics are published, and they are the most useful thing on Tabby's merchant help pages. Fixed weekly settlement lands every working Monday. Flexible settlement holds your money until the net amount clears SAR 2,500, then pays the following working Monday.
Payouts carry a fee. Tabby's published cycle documentation lists SAR 6 on payouts above SAR 2,500 and SAR 25 on payouts below it. A small merchant on a weekly fixed cycle can therefore pay SAR 25 a week purely to be paid.
The risk transfer is genuine and it is the strongest part of the merchant proposition. You are paid the full order value whether or not the customer ever repays Tabby, and once Tabby authorises a transaction it carries that customer's risk even if the order later proves fraudulent.
The June 2026 SAMA consumer and SME finance licences change what Tabby is to a merchant. Baskets from SAR 2,000 to SAR 50,000 can now be split over 12 months on a Murabaha structure, and the same provider can lend your business working capital.
What You Are Actually Signing Up For
Most Tabby coverage is written for shoppers. This is not that. The question here is narrower and more expensive to get wrong: what does it cost, operationally and financially, for a Saudi business to put a Tabby button at its checkout?
Tabby is a licensed Saudi finance company that pays you the full value of an order at settlement and then collects instalments from your customer on its own account. It is not a payment gateway, and it is not a card acquirer. That distinction matters because the pricing, the settlement cadence and the risk allocation all behave differently from the mada or Visa rails you already run, and merchants who benchmark a BNPL quote against a card rate usually conclude they are being overcharged before they have understood what they are buying.
RegulatorSAMA-licensed finance company
Stated reach25M+ users, 65,000+ businesses
Merchant pricingNot published — quoted per merchant
SettlementWeekly, every working Monday
The regulatory position is settled in a way it was not two years ago. Tabby graduated from SAMA's regulatory sandbox and its Saudi entity holds a buy now, pay later licence granted in 2025. On 29 June 2026 the Saudi Central Bank added a consumer finance licence and an SME finance licence on top. Tabby states it serves more than 25 million registered users and over 65,000 businesses across the GCC, with Saudi Arabia its largest market. Those are company figures, not audited ones, but the scale is not seriously in dispute.
What you are buying, then, is distribution plus credit underwriting. You are renting access to a customer base that already holds an approved limit inside an app it opens weekly, and you are transferring the collection problem to somebody else. Whether that is worth three to seven percent of the basket is a question only your margin can answer, and the honest answer for a low-margin category is often no.
The Merchant Fee: What Tabby Publishes and What It Does Not
This is the section merchants skip to, so we will be blunt at the top: Tabby does not publish its merchant discount rate for Saudi Arabia. Anyone quoting you a precise percentage as fact is guessing.
What Tabby does publish is the structure, and the structure is worth reading closely because it is more informative than it first appears. Its merchant help documentation describes two components. The first is a variable commission rate that, in Tabby's own words, may differ from one merchant to another based on factors such as industry and business profile. The second is a fixed fee per transaction, described as a small standard fee applied to each successful order. Tabby's regional pricing guidance has documented that fixed component as SAR 1 per successful order in Saudi Arabia and AED 1 in the UAE.
The third published detail is the one most merchants miss and the one most worth using in negotiation: Tabby states that both fees already include payment gateway charges, and that there are no hidden or additional costs beyond what is stated in your agreement. If a competing BNPL quote looks cheaper on the headline percentage but still leaves you paying gateway fees separately, the cheaper quote may not be cheaper. Ask every provider the same question in writing and compare the all-in number, not the advertised one.
On the percentage itself we will not invent a figure. Third-party commentary on Saudi BNPL commonly describes merchant discount rates somewhere in a three to seven percent band, with fashion and beauty at the top and thin-margin categories such as electronics and grocery negotiating downward on volume. Treat that as unverified market observation rather than a Tabby number: it is not published by Tabby, not attributed to a disclosed methodology, and not a rate you can hold anyone to. The only rate that exists for your business is the one in your signed contract.
Settlement: The Monday Cycle and the Payout Fee
Fees get the attention; settlement determines whether BNPL helps or hurts your working capital. Here Tabby publishes more than most merchants realise, and the detail includes a cost that almost nobody models.
Tabby offers two payout cycles and lets you switch between them at any time, with the change taking effect from the following week. On the fixed weekly cycle, payouts are transferred every working Monday regardless of the amount. On the flexible cycle, payouts are held until the net amount — after commission and VAT — reaches SAR 2,500, at which point they are paid on the following working Monday. Either way, Monday is the day money moves, and bank posting adds its own delay on top.
The part that deserves a line in your model is the payout fee. Tabby's published cycle documentation lists a fee of SAR 6 on payouts above SAR 2,500 and SAR 25 on payouts below that threshold, with the flexible cycle attracting the flat SAR 6 because by definition it only pays out above the threshold. For a merchant turning over SAR 40,000 a month through Tabby this is rounding. For a merchant doing SAR 1,500 a week on a fixed cycle, SAR 25 a week is roughly 1.7 percent of the payout, charged on top of a commission you already thought was the whole price.
What Tabby gets right here
The cycle is published, in specific terms, on Tabby's own merchant help pages — which is more than several of its competitors offer.
You can switch between the fixed weekly and flexible cycles yourself from the merchant dashboard rather than renegotiating a contract.
There is no discretionary rolling reserve documented in the public payout material, and no published holdback on your first transactions.
Payout reports break out order details, fees deducted, the net amount transferred and refund adjustments, which makes reconciliation to your ledger tractable.
What to plan around
Weekly is not daily. If your cash conversion cycle assumes card-style next-day settlement, BNPL volume will quietly stretch it, and the effect scales with the share of checkout you hand to Tabby.
If you reach Tabby through an aggregator such as Tap Payments, PayTabs or Checkout.com rather than directly, your payout cadence follows that aggregator's cycle and its fee schedule — not the one documented above. Confirm which contract governs your money before you sign.
Who Carries the Risk When the Customer Does Not Pay
This is the strongest part of Tabby's merchant proposition, and it is the reason a mid-single-digit commission can still be rational for a category that would never accept it on card.
Tabby's merchant documentation is unambiguous on the core point: you receive the full order value according to your payout schedule, and you are paid regardless of whether the customer subsequently pays Tabby. The collection problem, the repayment reminders and the losses sit entirely on Tabby's balance sheet. On fraud the position is similarly clear — where a transaction has been successfully authorised by Tabby, Tabby takes on that customer's risk whether or not the transaction later turns out to be fraudulent. For a merchant used to owning card chargeback exposure, that is a materially different deal.
Disputes are a separate matter from credit risk, and here the obligations flow back to you. Every Tabby retailer is enrolled in Tabby Care, its buyer protection programme, which covers online Tabby purchases for missing orders, damaged items and failed returns. The shopper must approach you first; if it stays unresolved, they escalate to Tabby. Once a dispute is raised you have 14 days to respond from the dashboard — approve it and refund, or challenge it with evidence, in which case Tabby arbitrates and decides. Miss the window and you have effectively conceded. Tabby's buyer protection policy also excludes claims where it determines there is actual or suspected fraud, collusion with a merchant, or misuse of the programme.
Where the risk allocation favours you
Customer default is entirely Tabby's loss. You keep the full order value and never chase an instalment.
Authorised transactions carry Tabby's fraud risk, which removes a category of exposure you carry on cards.
Refunds, partial refunds and cancellations are initiated by you from the merchant dashboard and appear as adjustments on the payout report rather than as an off-system credit note.
Where it does not
The 14-day dispute response window is a real operational obligation. Somebody in your business has to own the dashboard queue, or defaults become losses by inattention.
Tabby arbitrates disputes it is also a party to. That is standard across the category, but it is not neutral third-party adjudication and you should not model it as such.
Tabby does not publish whether commission is returned to you when an order is refunded. For a fashion retailer running a 30 percent return rate this single unanswered question can move your effective cost by more than a point — get it in writing before you sign.
Integration: Salla, Zid, Shopify, WooCommerce and Magento
For a mainstream Saudi stack, integration is close to a non-issue. The interesting decision is not whether you can connect Tabby but whether you connect to it directly or through a gateway you already use.
Tabby maintains developer documentation and plugins for the platforms most Saudi merchants actually run — Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento 2, Zid and OpenCart among them — and publishes an official app in the Shopify App Store. On Salla, Tabby sits alongside mada, Apple Pay and the card schemes as a natively supported payment option that a merchant enables from the store dashboard rather than installing. In practice that means a Salla or Zid merchant is looking at a dashboard toggle and a commercial agreement, not a development project.
The alternative route is an aggregator. Tabby is reachable through Tap Payments, PayTabs, Checkout.com, Geidea and Amazon Payment Services, which is attractive if you want one gateway relationship, one reconciliation file and one support contact for cards and BNPL together. The trade-off is the one flagged above: your settlement cadence and fee schedule then belong to the aggregator, and you lose the direct payout controls Tabby documents for its own merchants. Neither route is wrong; picking one without noticing the difference is.
One under-discussed extra is the product catalogue feature. Tabby lists merchant products inside its own shopping surface, pulled from the WooCommerce plugin from version 5.0.8 and the Magento 2 plugin from version 5.0.11, or via an XML feed or SFTP credentials if your platform has no plugin. Whether it drives meaningful traffic is a question you should ask for numbers on rather than take on trust, but it is a distribution channel that comes attached to a payment method, which is unusual.
Onboarding: What Tabby Asks For Before You Go Live
Tabby markets a fast setup — get started in minutes, live within 24 hours. The application form is genuinely short; the document review is where timelines actually go.
The published process is five steps: go to Tabby Business, start an application, complete a form with your company name, business website, store location and contact details along with your chosen integration type, upload your documents, and submit for review. The documents Tabby names are a trade licence, a VAT certificate, and a bank statement or cheque. For a Saudi business that means your commercial registration, your ZATCA VAT certificate and a corporate account in the trading entity's name, with bank ownership verified before production access is enabled.
The predictable failure points are mundane. A commercial registration whose activity does not cover what you actually sell, a bank account in a founder's personal name rather than the company's, a website that is still behind a coming-soon page when the reviewer opens it, or a VAT certificate that does not match the CR entity. Tabby's own application guidance effectively says as much: make sure your contact details are reachable and that your website or sales channel is live and accessible for review. Merchants who have those four artefacts consistent with each other tend to clear quickly; merchants who do not spend a fortnight in email.
What makes onboarding easy
The application is self-service and short — no sales call is required to start the process.
The document list is the standard Saudi set, so a compliant business already has everything on file.
Integration type is chosen at application, so e-commerce, in-store and payment-link merchants are routed correctly from the start.
What to expect anyway
The 24-hour setup claim is Tabby's own marketing and describes the technical enablement, not the underwriting and document review that precedes it.
Your commercial terms are not disclosed until this stage, which means you cannot compare providers on price before investing time in two application processes.
Six Costs That Do Not Appear in the Headline Rate
The commission is the number you negotiate. These are the six that decide what Tabby actually costs your business over a year — and every one of them is knowable before you sign, if you ask.
01
The fixed fee against your basket size
Tabby's documented fixed component is SAR 1 per successful order. On a SAR 1,500 sofa that is invisible. On a SAR 45 cosmetics order it is 2.2 percent before the commission is applied at all. If your average order value is low, model the fixed fee on your real order distribution rather than on an average basket, because averages hide exactly the orders this fee punishes.
02
The payout fee against your payout frequency
SAR 25 per payout below SAR 2,500 and SAR 6 above it, per Tabby's published cycle documentation. Fifty-two small weekly payouts is SAR 1,300 a year in fees to receive your own money. Merchants below the threshold should look hard at the flexible cycle, which trades speed for the lower fee.
03
The working capital you are financing
Weekly settlement means you are funding up to a week of BNPL sales at any moment, and the flexible cycle can stretch that further while it waits for the SAR 2,500 threshold. That is not a fee, but it is a cost, and it grows in direct proportion to how successful the Tabby button is at your checkout.
04
Refund treatment of the commission
Unpublished, and materially expensive in high-return categories. If commission is retained on refunded orders, a 30 percent return rate inflates your effective cost on net revenue by roughly 40 percent of the headline rate. Ask the question explicitly, get the answer in the agreement, and price the gap if you cannot.
05
The dispute handling headcount
Fourteen days to respond, from a dashboard somebody has to check. At low volume this is minutes a week. At scale it is a named responsibility, and the cost of not assigning it is paid in conceded disputes rather than in invoices.
06
The aggregator layer, if you use one
Routing Tabby through Tap Payments, PayTabs or Checkout.com is convenient and gives you one reconciliation. It also inserts a party with its own margin, its own settlement cadence and its own fee schedule between you and Tabby. Get both the direct and the aggregated quote before deciding which is cheaper.
The Full Cost Stack, Line by Line
Here is every published and unpublished component of what a Saudi merchant pays Tabby, with an honest disclosure column. Note how much of this table says not published — that is the state of the market, not a gap in our research.
Cost component
Published?
Amount
Set by
Applies to
Variable commission
Structure only
Not published
Industry and business profile; fixed in your contract
Every successful Tabby order
Fixed per-order fee
Yes
SAR 1 per successful order
Tabby, standard
Every successful Tabby order, regardless of value
Payment gateway charges
Yes
Included — no separate charge
Tabby, stated in merchant documentation
Direct Tabby integrations
Payout fee
Yes
SAR 6 above SAR 2,500; SAR 25 below
Tabby payout cycle documentation
Each payout transfer, not each order
Commission on refunded orders
No
Not published
Merchant agreement — ask before signing
Returns and cancellations
Two things follow from this table. First, the only components Tabby publishes are the small ones. The fixed fee, the gateway inclusion and the payout fee are all documented and all secondary; the commission that determines ninety percent of your cost is disclosed to you and nobody else. Second, the components you cannot see are precisely the ones that vary by merchant, which is not an accident — it is how a negotiated rate stays negotiable.
The practical response is to stop asking what Tabby charges and start asking what Tabby charges you. Request a quote, then rebuild your effective rate on your own twelve-month order distribution: commission plus SAR 1 on every order, plus the payout fee at your real payout frequency, plus your best estimate of the refund treatment. Merchants with low average order values and high return rates consistently discover an effective cost well above the headline percentage they were quoted.
Then set that number against the counterfactual, which is not zero. BNPL is bought for conversion and basket lift, and both Tabby and its competitors publish uplift claims that are vendor-generated and unattributed to any disclosed methodology. Do not plan on them. Run the button on a subset of traffic, measure your own conversion delta and your own average order value, and decide against your own data — it is the only uplift figure in this category anybody can actually stand behind.
The Alternatives Worth Quoting Against
Tabby is the largest but not the only SAMA-supervised option, and getting a second quote is the cheapest lever you have on your rate. None of these providers publishes merchant pricing either, so the comparison below is on structure, reach and regulatory standing.
Provider
Best for
SAMA status
Plan lengths
Merchant fee published
Our rating
Tabby
Highest-reach default for fashion, beauty, electronics and repeat-purchase retail
BNPL licence (2025); consumer and SME finance licences (29 June 2026)
3 or 4 interest-free instalments; up to 12 months on SAR 2,000 to SAR 50,000
Structure only — commission not published
4.5/5
Tamara
Furniture, appliances and jewellery where tenor matters more than reach
Consumer finance and BNPL licence (March 2025)
2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12 or 24 payments subject to eligibility
Not published at all
4.3/5
Madfu
Merchants who want a smaller, hungrier provider and a Shariah-first product story
SAMA BNPL licence
Up to six interest-free instalments
Not published
3.8/5
MISpay
In-store-weighted merchants wanting a longer instalment ladder from a smaller player
Supervised by SAMA
4 to 12 instalments
Not published
3.6/5
Tamara
The other name every Saudi merchant considers, and the more transparent of the two on merchant mechanics. Tamara publishes its merchant terms and conditions, which is genuinely unusual in this category and lets you model settlement before signing. It also stretches to 24 payments, which nothing in Tabby's line reaches.
Quote it alongside Tabby always — the transparency is worth having in the room even if you end up choosing Tabby. But read the settlement clauses carefully: what Tamara publishes is stricter than what Tabby publishes, including holdback provisions and fee retention on refunded transactions.
Madfu
A Riyadh-founded, SAMA-licensed BNPL provider offering Shariah-compliant splits of up to six interest-free instalments. It closed a USD 25.5 million pre-Series A in February 2026 led by Afaq Capital, explicitly earmarked for merchant network expansion.
Not a replacement for Tabby at your checkout, but a credible third quote — and a provider in a growth phase has more reason to price aggressively for a merchant it wants. Diligence the settlement terms and the support model harder than you would with the incumbents.
MISpay
A smaller Saudi BNPL operating under SAMA supervision, splitting purchases across four to twelve instalments with the same core merchant promise — the merchant is paid the full amount and MISpay owns collection.
Worth a call if your mix is in-store heavy or your category sits outside the fashion and electronics core the large players optimise for. Reach is the obvious trade-off: a smaller installed base means fewer shoppers arriving at your checkout already approved.
Our Verdict
Our Verdict on Tabby for Merchants
Tabby is the strongest BNPL proposition available to a Saudi merchant in 2026, and it is also the one whose true cost you cannot determine before you apply. Both of those things are true at once, and any review that resolves the tension in either direction is selling something.
Customer reach
Distribution4.8/5
25 million-plus registered users and 65,000-plus businesses across the GCC, with Saudi Arabia the largest market. No competitor puts more already-approved shoppers in front of your checkout.
Risk transfer
Who carries default4.7/5
You are paid in full regardless of customer repayment, and authorised transactions carry Tabby fraud risk. This is the clearest, best-documented part of the merchant deal and it is what the commission is actually buying.
Settlement
Cash flow impact3.6/5
The Monday cycle is published and switchable, which is more than most. It is still weekly rather than daily, and the SAR 25 small-payout fee is a real cost for small merchants that almost nobody models.
Pricing transparency
What you can know2.6/5
The fixed fee, the gateway inclusion and the payout fees are documented. The commission that determines your actual cost is not, and neither is the refund treatment. You cannot benchmark a quote you cannot compare.
Our recommendation is unglamorous: apply, get the quote, and then do the arithmetic Tabby cannot do for you. Rebuild the effective rate on your own order distribution including the SAR 1 per order and the payout fee at your real frequency, get the refund treatment in writing, and run the button on a slice of traffic before you commit your whole checkout. If the conversion lift on your own data covers the all-in cost, Tabby is an easy yes — its reach and its risk transfer are genuinely best in market. If it does not, no amount of vendor uplift statistics will change that, and the honest answer is to keep the button off.
Frequently Asked Questions
01How much does Tabby charge merchants in Saudi Arabia?
Tabby does not publish a merchant discount rate. Its merchant documentation describes the structure — a variable commission set by your industry and business profile, plus a small fixed fee on every successful order, with payment gateway charges already included — and states that the exact figures are provided at application stage and documented in your contract. Its regional pricing guidance documents the fixed component as SAR 1 per successful order. Third-party commentary places Saudi BNPL commissions broadly in a three to seven percent band, but that is unverified market observation and not a Tabby figure.
02When does Tabby pay merchants, and is there a fee?
Tabby offers a fixed weekly cycle, which pays every working Monday regardless of amount, and a flexible cycle, which holds funds until the net amount after commission and VAT reaches SAR 2,500 and then pays on the following working Monday. You can switch between them from the merchant dashboard, effective the following week. Tabby publishes a payout fee of SAR 6 on payouts above SAR 2,500 and SAR 25 on payouts below it. If you reach Tabby through an aggregator such as Tap Payments, the aggregator cycle and fees govern instead.
03What happens if a Tabby customer never pays their instalments?
Nothing, from your side. Tabby states that merchants receive the full order value according to their payout schedule and are paid regardless of whether the customer repays. The collection risk sits with Tabby. On fraud, Tabby's merchant guidance states that once a transaction is successfully authorised, Tabby takes on that customer risk even if the transaction later proves fraudulent. Disputes are handled separately under the Tabby Care buyer protection programme, where you have 14 days to respond before Tabby decides.
04Does Tabby work with Salla, Zid, Shopify and WooCommerce?
Yes. Tabby publishes plugins and developer documentation for Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento 2, Zid and OpenCart among others, and has an official app in the Shopify App Store. On Salla it appears as a natively supported payment option enabled from the store dashboard rather than installed. It can also be reached through aggregators including Tap Payments, PayTabs, Checkout.com, Geidea and Amazon Payment Services — convenient for single-gateway reconciliation, but your settlement cadence and fees then follow the aggregator.
05What documents do I need to become a Tabby merchant in Saudi Arabia?
Tabby names a trade licence, a VAT certificate, and a bank statement or cheque. For a Saudi business that means your commercial registration, your ZATCA VAT certificate and a corporate bank account in the trading entity's name, with bank ownership verified before production access is granted. The application also asks for your company name, business website, store location and contact details, plus the integration type you want. Make sure the CR activity, the VAT entity and the bank account name all match, and that your website is live when a reviewer opens it.
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