Selling online in Oman — the licence nobody writes about

You need a licence to sell online in Oman. It has been that way since February 2024, under an instrument that almost nothing written in English mentions. Meanwhile the law that every consultancy page does cite — the Electronic Transactions Law of 2008 — was repealed in April 2025. If a page tells you otherwise on either point, it has not been updated in two years.

The two instruments that decide whether a page is worth reading

Start with what is wrong. Royal Decree 69/2008, the old Electronic Transactions Law, is the instrument cited in essentially every English-language guide to selling online in Oman. It was repealed by Royal Decree 39/2025, published in Official Gazette 1591 on 13 April 2025 and in force from 14 April 2025. Decree.om carries the repeal notice on the face of the 2008 decree. A guide that still leans on RD 69/2008 was written before that and has not been touched since.

Now what is missing. The instrument that actually governs selling online is Ministerial Decision 499/2023, the E-Commerce Regulatory Regulation (اللائحة التنظيمية للتجارة الإلكترونية), issued by MOCIIP, published in Official Gazette 1510 on 10 September 2023 and in force 90 days later — approximately 5 February 2024. Its Article 2 is one sentence: "لا يجوز مزاولة التجارة الإلكترونية إلا بعد الحصول على الترخيص" — e-commerce may not be practised without first obtaining the licence. Article 1 defines e-commerce as an economic activity between a licensee and a consumer conducted by electronic means, for selling, offering, marketing or promoting goods and services.

Is e-commerce closed to foreign investors? No — and here is the evidence

The first thing a foreign reader wants to know is whether the negative list — the schedule of activities reserved to Omanis — closes online selling. It does not. We read all three instruments in the chain rather than relying on any summary of them.

No item in any of the three relates to internet sales, e-commerce, online retail or trading platforms. The list restricts what you sell, not that you sell it online. Groceries, mobile phones and accessories, fuel stations, dates and honey, Omani daggers, handicrafts and real-estate brokerage are closed to foreign investors whether you sell them from a shop in Ruwi or from an Instagram account.

Who may hold the licence — and the contradiction we cannot resolve

Article 3 of MD 499/2023 sets the eligibility conditions. A natural person applicant must be of Omani nationality and at least 18 years old. A commercial company applicant must be registered in the commercial register. Both must obtain any sector regulator's approval where the activity requires one. Read literally, the individual route is closed to foreign nationals and the company route is not.

But gov.om publishes a service card for a licence to practise e-commerce (freelancers) at OMR 6.500 under local investment and OMR 12.500 under foreign investment, states that no documents are required and the processing time is 30 minutes, and gives its target audience as "citizens and foreign residents". There is a matching pair of cards for commercial companies at the same two prices. A scheme closed to foreigners would not need a foreign-investment rate, and would not name foreign residents as its audience.

One further consequence worth naming. The home business route under Ministerial Decision 473/2022 is expressly Omani-nationals-only, so it is not an alternative for a foreign resident who wants a low-cost individual footing. That leaves the company route as the only path we can describe with confidence.

What the licence costs — and where that figure does not come from

This is worth stating carefully, because it is the sort of thing every other page gets wrong by omission. MD 499/2023 sets no fee at all. We read the regulation through and there is no fee article, no schedule of charges, and no reference to one. The OMR 6.500 and OMR 12.500 figures appear only on the gov.om service cards. They are published by the government, so we quote them — but we could not trace them to any legal instrument.

The licence is issued by the Department, for one, two or three years as the applicant asks (Article 4), and must specify the electronic means or e-store used (Article 5). Renewal must be applied for before expiry (Article 6). A refusal may be appealed to the Minister within 60 days, and the Minister must decide within 30 days (Article 7). Article 8 requires you to keep a business address matching your licence, or your commercial register if you are a company.

What Article 9 obliges you to publish on your store

This is the part of the regulation you will actually have to comply with, and it is a concrete checklist rather than a general principle. Article 9 requires the licensee to disclose, through an electronic link on the store:

• Accurate data about the goods or services offered
• The measures taken to protect consumer data
• The procedure for making a complaint
• The tax identification number, where applicable
• The licence number and the trademark
• Contact channels and customer-service details
• The return and exchange policy (سياسة الاستبدال والاسترجاع), in line with the applicable law
• The terms and conditions of use of the e-store

Article 10 is the one that surprises people: the licensee must connect to a bank or a payment service provider licensed in Oman. That is a legal obligation on the merchant about which gateway it uses, not merely a commercial choice — and it is the reason the payment-gateway section below matters more here than it would elsewhere.

The operating duties that follow

• Article 11 — a clear mechanism for the customer to correct errors before dispatch or delivery.
• Article 12 — a means for the consumer to opt out of receiving electronic notifications.
• Article 13 — notify the competent authorities and the Ministry on discovering a breach of the electronic platform.
• Article 16 — display the store's certification prominently, and notify changes within 15 days.
• Article 17 — the Department supervises compliance and may require documents evidencing it.

Maroof Oman, and the platform with a confusing name

Articles 14 to 16 provide for a Ministry-run website for documenting e-stores, and for licensed certification companies that submit their methodology, their technical and administrative data-protection measures, their policy for handling data when service ends, and a written undertaking to supply licensee data through the Ministry's portal. In practice this is Maroof Oman (معروف عُمان), launched on 15 November 2023 alongside the Oman Business Platform and the Hazm conformity platform. It registers online stores, links them to the commercial registration record, and carries QR verification, customer ratings and a complaints route.

We could not open the live Omani platform to confirm its address, so we are not printing a URL we have not tested. Ask at a Sanad centre or through the Oman Business Platform for the current link rather than following one from a search result.

Penalties

Article 18 lets the Ministry impose one or more of the following on a licensee in breach. Note that the money is modest and the operational consequences are not.

• A written warning
• An administrative fine of up to OMR 500, doubled on repetition within three years
• Suspension of the store's certification until the breach is remedied
• Blocking the e-store, in coordination with the competent authorities
• Revocation of the licence on repeated breach within three years

Article 19 gives the recipient 60 days to appeal to the Minister, and requires the decision to be reasoned in writing. A fine of OMR 500 is not what should worry you here; having your store blocked in the middle of a trading month is.

There is no cooling-off period in Oman

Oman publishes no cooling-off period and no right of withdrawal for online purchases. We looked for one specifically, in Arabic and in English, and there is no Omani instrument granting a buyer the right to return goods simply because they changed their mind. This is a genuine finding, not a gap in our research, and it is the single point on which readers most often arrive misinformed.

What does exist is a defect remedy. Article 15 of Decision 77/2017, the Executive Regulation of the Consumer Protection Law, as amended by Consumer Protection Authority Decision 1/2022 (Official Gazette 1434, 20 March 2022), gives the consumer the right to replacement, return with refund at no additional cost, or repair, where a good listed in Appendix 2 to the regulation is defective, does not conform to the standard specification, or does not meet the purpose for which it was contracted — within 15 days of receipt. That is a remedy for something being wrong with the goods. It is not a change-of-mind right, and reading it as one will cost you money.

Searches on this point are almost useless. The Arabic term for a right of withdrawal, حق العدول, returns Algerian academic articles. The English search returns a Gulf News piece headlined "Consumer rights law allows you to return online purchases within 7 days" — which is about the United Arab Emirates. Neither describes Omani law.

What the consumer rules do require of you

• Article 33 bis (added in 2022) — a supplier, advertiser or agent inside Oman, or with a representative or agent there, contracting at a distance must obtain the competent authority's approval, display the goods authentically, specify delivery details, and set a clear return and exchange policy.
• Article 12 — the invoice must carry your name, registration number, the contract date, the price with tax shown, quantity, delivery details and warranty information.
• Article 23 — origin, composition, instructions for use and precautions must be disclosed, primarily in Arabic.
• Article 24 — the selling price must be written on the item, its packaging or its container, clearly and legibly.
• Article 27 — a minimum three-month warranty on the goods and services listed in the regulation's appendices, unless a longer period applies.
• Article 9 — the competent department must decide a consumer complaint within 30 days of a complete submission.

Note how Article 33 bis and MD 499/2023 Article 9 interlock: both require you to have a return and exchange policy, and neither tells you what it must say.

That is the practically useful conclusion of this whole section. You write the policy. You are then bound by it. Because Oman imposes no statutory withdrawal window, whatever you publish becomes the contractual standard your customers can hold you to and the Consumer Protection Authority can measure you against. Write it deliberately, once, rather than copying a UAE store's terms that promise a fourteen-day no-questions return you did not intend to offer.

Payment gateways: who actually operates in Oman

The framework is the National Payment Systems Law, Royal Decree 8/2018, published in Official Gazette 1232 on 25 February 2018. The division of responsibility is simple and worth getting right: the gateway needs a Central Bank of Oman licence; you, the merchant, do not. Your obligation, under Article 10 of MD 499/2023, is only to connect to one that is licensed in Oman. We could not read the substantive articles of RD 8/2018 — decree.om paywalls the text beyond the preamble, and the Central Bank's own pages did not return content to us — so we describe the framework, not its detail.

OmanNet is the only one that publishes its rates on a government page. The gov.om service for linking an electronic payment gateway to OmanNet PG gives the fee as 1.5% of the transaction value, capped at OMR 10 for the private sector, and 1% capped at OMR 5.320 for the government sector. The applicant must hold an account at a licensed local Omani bank, and the only document listed is the system integration document. That is the most transparent pricing in the Omani market, and it is a debit-card rate — it does not cover Visa or Mastercard credit acquiring, which you arrange with your bank.

Everyone else is quote-only. We looked at each provider's own pages and none of Thawani, AmwalPay, PayTabs, Tap or Bank Muscat publishes a per-transaction rate, a setup fee or a settlement period. We are not going to invent figures for them. That is the finding: you cannot compare Omani gateways on published prices, so you will have to ask three of them for written quotes and compare those. Ask specifically about the percentage, any fixed per-transaction amount, the monthly minimum, the settlement period in working days, the chargeback fee, and whether settlement is in OMR to an Omani account.

VAT on online sales

Selling online does not change the VAT position. The standard rate is 5%. Registration is mandatory once taxable supplies pass OMR 38,500 measured over any rolling twelve months, and voluntary above OMR 19,250. Returns are quarterly, due within 30 days of the end of each quarter, and filed box by box. The detail is in our VAT registration guide, and the invoicing mechanics — including what your store's receipts must carry — are in our invoicing and POS guide.

Two negative findings worth recording. We found no e-commerce-specific VAT rule in Oman, and no marketplace deemed-supplier rule of the kind the EU and the UK operate, under which the platform rather than the seller accounts for the tax. And we could not trace an Omani customs de minimis for parcels to a government page — the Tax Authority's own imports and exports guide was not retrievable. If you are building a business on importing low-value goods and reselling them online, that threshold is a real commercial variable and you should get it in writing from Customs rather than from any guide, including this one.

Marketplaces, Instagram, and the concealed-trade risk

On marketplaces, the position for an Omani seller is thinner than the marketing suggests. noon treats Oman as a destination market in its GCC lane, with sellers registering as UAE sellers; we found no Omani seller registration route. Amazon has no Omani marketplace, and Amazon.ae and Amazon.sa reach Omani customers as cross-border shipping destinations rather than as places an Omani business registers to sell. If a consultant offers to "register you on Amazon Oman", ask them which marketplace they mean.

On social media, the point is sharper and worth being blunt about. MD 499/2023 contains no carve-out for social media. Article 1 defines the e-store as a platform through which the licensee practises the activity, and Article 2 prohibits practising e-commerce without a licence. An Instagram or WhatsApp shop selling goods for money is caught by that in exactly the same way a website is. The absence of enforcement stories does not change what the instrument says.

There is a separate and larger exposure. Ministerial Decision 412/2023 on combating concealed trade carries penalties reported at up to OMR 15,000 — an order of magnitude above the OMR 500 administrative fine in the e-commerce regulation. Selling in a sustained, commercial way without a commercial registration is the conduct that instrument is aimed at. Our freelancing guide sets out what is and is not available to an individual in Oman.

What we could not find out

Four things a careful reader will want that we could not establish from any source we could reach. We would rather list them than paper over them.

• The six-digit Omani activity code for internet retail. Oman builds its national classification on ISIC Rev.4 plus two national digits, and the international class for retail sale via mail order or internet is 4791 — but the Invest Easy ISIC browser is closed to automated retrieval, so we cannot give you the Omani code beneath it.
• Whether the MD 499/2023 licence sits in addition to, or instead of, an e-commerce activity code on your commercial registration. The regulation does not say, and no gov.om page we found says. This is the most obvious practical question about the whole scheme and it appears to be unpublished. Ask MOCIIP directly.
• What RD 39/2025 actually requires of an online seller. Its body is paywalled. What we can confirm is that it has 37 articles in 7 chapters, replacing 54 in 9; that it moved the regulator from the former Information Technology Authority to MTCIT; that it adds trust services, electronic identity and intermediary responsibilities; that penalties reach OMR 50,000 and five years' imprisonment; and that it directs MTCIT to issue implementing regulations. We are not going to tell you what its contract-formation or record-retention articles say, because we have not read them.
• Appendix 2 to Decision 77/2017 — the list of goods carrying the 15-day defect remedy — and the legal basis for the OMR 6.500 and OMR 12.500 licence fees, which appear on gov.om and nowhere in the regulation.

What will surface in your search results, and why to ignore it

If you want the e-commerce licence filed alongside the commercial registration, the activity selected deliberately rather than by guesswork, and the Article 9 disclosures and your return policy drafted so they say what you actually mean, our office in Al Ghubra does that work. Where this guide has said a figure is untraceable or two official sources disagree, we will tell you the same thing across a desk.