Tabby

Tabby is the buy-now-pay-later name shoppers in the Gulf already trust. Founded in Dubai in 2019, it now serves more than 15 million customers across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and Egypt, and is accepted at over 40,000 brands. For a GCC store, offering Tabby is no longer a nice-to-have; it is an expectation at the point a customer decides whether to commit. Karve builds that expectation into your checkout properly, rather than bolting on a plugin and hoping it renders.

The mechanics are simple for the shopper: split the total into four interest-free payments, with the first 25 per cent taken upfront and the rest collected automatically over the following months. On larger baskets, longer plans of up to twelve months are available. There are no fees or interest for the customer when payments are made on time, which is exactly why a higher-priced item suddenly feels affordable and why carts that would otherwise be abandoned get completed.

Why the integration details matter

Tabby earns its keep before the checkout, not just inside it. A promotional snippet on the product and cart pages tells a shopper that an AED 1,200 item is really four payments of AED 300, and that message is what lifts conversion. If that snippet is missing, slow, or only appears on the final payment step, most of the value is lost. Karve places it where it does its job, keeps it consistent in English and Arabic, and makes sure it reflects the live price and currency rather than a hardcoded example.

Behind the scenes, Tabby runs on a region-aware API: UAE and Kuwait traffic goes to one endpoint, Saudi Arabia to another, with the same payloads on both. A checkout session pre-scores the buyer, an authorised payment is created, and webhooks report status changes so your order state stays in sync. Captures and refunds are handled through the same API and reconciled in Tabby's merchant dashboard. Karve treats all of this as part of your order pipeline, not a black box, so a refund in your admin reaches Tabby and a Tabby status change reaches your system.

How Karve integrates Tabby

• Renders the Tabby pre-purchase promo on product and cart pages, price-aware and localised for English and Arabic, so the instalment offer is visible where it influences the decision.
• Wires Tabby as a native payment method in headless and custom checkouts, creating checkout sessions, handling pre-scoring, and routing UAE, KSA and other GCC traffic to the correct regional endpoint.
• Implements server-side webhook handlers so authorisation, capture, cancellation and refund events keep your order and fulfilment state accurate.
• Connects refunds and cancellations in your admin or back office back to Tabby, with reconciliation against settlements so finance is not chasing mismatches.
• Sets up test and live credentials, sandbox flows and edge-case handling (declined pre-scoring, partial captures, abandoned sessions) so the integration is verified before it touches real orders.

Karve runs Tabby alongside Tamara, card payments and your existing gateway as one coherent checkout, not a stack of competing buttons. The result is a payment method that does what it is supposed to: more completed carts, larger orders, and a buyer journey that feels native to the region you are selling in.