Question # What is Salla? And why the difference between a platform and a marketplace decides how you can research its merchants. Last updated 24 October 2026 Salla (سلة) is a Saudi e-commerce platform that lets a business build and run its own online store. It is software a merchant subscribes to — storefront, catalogue, checkout, payments and shipping — not a marketplace where products from many sellers sit under one brand. Each Salla merchant operates an independent shop, either at a salla.sa/ address or on its own domain. That distinction is what makes a Salla store dataset possible. Because every store is a separate business with its own storefront and public presence, the merchant population can be described, segmented and counted. As of October 2026, SallaData had verified 41,038 Salla stores, 40,085 of them active — see [how many Salla stores there are](/questions/how-many-salla-stores/) for the breakdown. ## Is Salla a marketplace? No. The two models look similar to a shopper and behave nothing alike for anyone selling to the businesses behind them. On a marketplace , the customer relationship belongs to the marketplace. Sellers are listings inside someone else's storefront. They rarely control their own domain, branding, checkout or customer data, and they are usually not addressable as independent businesses. On a platform like Salla, the merchant owns the storefront. They choose a domain, design, payment and shipping setup, and install apps to extend what the store does. Each one is a company making its own software and service decisions — which is exactly what makes them a market. Salla does also run a shopper-facing marketplace, [Mahally (محلي)](https://mahally.com/), which lists products from Salla stores. But the stores exist independently of it: Mahally is a discovery channel on top of the platform, not the platform itself. ## What kinds of stores run on Salla? In the October 2026 SallaData build, the largest categories were Fashion & Abayas (4,331 stores), Beauty & Cosmetics (3,584) and Jewelry & Watches (2,664), out of 21 categories in total — from digital products and courses to dates and honey. Not every merchant is a registered company: 39% of stores publish a commercial registration number, while 31% publish a freelance licence, the document individuals can trade under. ## Why does this matter if you sell to merchants? If you build Salla apps, sell SaaS, run an agency, or provide logistics, payments, photography, accounting or marketing services to online retailers, Salla merchants are a defined and reachable set of potential customers. Their public characteristics — category, how they can be contacted, which payment options they offer, whether they are a registered company, how long they have been trading — are what you would use to decide which of them are worth approaching. The practical problem is that this information is scattered across tens of thousands of individual storefronts. Assembling it by hand is the slow path; that is the gap a structured dataset fills. ## What counts as a "Salla store" in a dataset? For research purposes a Salla store is one storefront confirmed to run on the platform, identified by its public address. One business running two distinct storefronts is two records; one storefront reachable at both a salla.sa address and a custom domain is one record. Closed stores are kept and labelled rather than dropped. The fields SallaData records are the ones stores publish themselves: store name, website and Salla link, store since, category, the store's own menu categories, phone, WhatsApp, email, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and X, BNPL providers such as Tamara and Tabby, commercial registration, freelance licence and VAT numbers, plus store status and the date last verified. Private data — orders, revenue, customers — is not public and is not in the dataset; inside a store it is reachable only through the [Salla API](/questions/salla-api-vs-store-database/), with the merchant's permission. ## Sources and method This page describes how the Salla platform works and how SallaData models it. Figures are from the SallaData October 2026 build; Mahally's role is as described on [mahally.com](https://mahally.com/), read on 24 October 2026. See the [methodology](/methodology/) for how stores are verified and how complete each field is. Salla is a product of its own company and is not affiliated with SallaData. SallaData is an independent research dataset about stores operating on the platform. ## Related questions [How many Salla stores are there?](/questions/how-many-salla-stores/) [How do you find Salla stores?](/questions/how-to-find-salla-stores/) [How do you find customers for a Salla app?](/questions/how-to-find-customers-for-a-salla-app/) [Salla API or a Salla store database?](/questions/salla-api-vs-store-database/) ## Researching the Salla ecosystem? SallaData turns the merchant population into a structured, filterable dataset. [Get SallaData](/#get-access) --- Source: https://salladata.com/questions/what-is-salla/ (updated 2026-10-24)