Building a Delivery & Payments App in Lebanon: OMT, Whish & Areeba Integration

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Building a delivery or payments app in Lebanon is not the same as building one in Dubai or London. The market is cash-heavy and dollarized, the payment rails are local, the power goes out, and customers expect Arabic, French and English. Get those four realities right and the app works. Miss them and it stalls. This is a practitioner walk-through of how to build a delivery and fintech app for Lebanon, from payment rails to driver dispatch.

The Lebanese delivery and cash-on-delivery landscape

Delivery is mature in Lebanon. Platforms such as Toters and Talabat have trained users to expect tracking, ratings and fast fulfilment, so a new app is judged against that bar from day one. The twist is payment behaviour: cash on delivery is still enormous, partly out of habit and partly because of the banking situation. So your app cannot treat COD as a fallback, it is a primary flow that needs proper handling for collection, reconciliation and driver float.

Wallet and card rails: OMT, Whish Money and Areeba

The digital side runs on local rails. OMT and Whish Money are the wallet and transfer services most Lebanese already use, and Areeba sits behind a lot of card acquiring. Your checkout integrates these so a customer can pay by wallet, card or cash. Importantly, you process payments through these licensed rails rather than touching raw card data yourself, which keeps your compliance burden manageable.

• OMT and Whish Money for wallet payments and transfers.
• Areeba and bank cards for card acquiring.
• Cash on delivery as a first-class, fully tracked method.
• Settlement and reconciliation per merchant and per driver.

Multi-currency USD/LBP checkout

Because the economy is dollarized, prices are usually in USD, but customers may pay in LBP. The checkout must show both, apply a rate you control, and record exactly what was charged in which currency. For cash on delivery this gets sharper: the driver might receive a mix of dollars and pounds, so the app records the split and reconciles it at end of shift. Anything less and your accounting will not tie out.

Driver app, dispatch and live tracking

A delivery platform is really three apps: the customer app, the merchant app and the driver app, all wired to a dispatch backend. The driver app needs live GPS tracking, turn-by-turn awareness, order acceptance and COD recording. The dispatch engine assigns orders by area and driver availability. Live tracking is what customers judge you on, so it has to stay accurate even when the network is flaky, which leads straight to offline handling.

Merchant onboarding across the governorates

You do not launch everywhere at once. Start in Beirut where density is highest, expand into Mount Lebanon, then push into the North through Tripoli. Each new area means onboarding merchants, signing them up, configuring menus or catalogues, and setting delivery zones. Build a self-service merchant onboarding flow so you are not manually setting up every shop. As you scale toward Sidon and Tyre in the South and Zahle in the Bekaa, the same flow keeps expansion cheap.

Notifications and offline-first design

Lebanese users live in WhatsApp and SMS. Send order confirmations, dispatch alerts and delivery updates over SMS and WhatsApp using touch and Alfa numbers, since these land even when data is weak. And because power cuts and patchy internet are a fact of life, the customer and driver apps must be offline-first: cache route and order data, queue status updates locally, and sync when the connection returns. A driver in a Tripoli neighbourhood with no signal should still be able to mark a delivery complete and have it sync later.

Compliance under Law 81/2018

You are handling personal data, addresses and payment information, so Law No. 81/2018, which covers electronic transactions and personal data in Lebanon, applies. That means consent at signup, encryption of sensitive data in transit and at rest, and access controls so staff only see what they need. Routing actual payment processing through OMT, Whish Money and Areeba keeps card data off your servers, which is both safer and simpler.

Tech stack, timeline and cost

For the apps, Flutter or React Native gives you customer and driver apps from shared code. The backend handles dispatch, payments and real-time tracking, usually with a managed database and a websocket layer for live updates. On numbers: a delivery and payments platform quoted in USD typically runs USD 35,000 to USD 90,000 depending on payment integrations, live tracking and how many cities you launch in, over a four to seven month timeline. Plan for ongoing maintenance at 15 to 20 percent of the build per year, because payment rails and mobile OSes keep changing under you.