E-commerce website design

Why e-commerce is not one of the fixed packages

A brochure website is finished when it launches. A store is a system you operate every day: products go out of stock, prices change, couriers lose parcels, payments fail and get refunded, customers email asking where their order is.

That means the honest quote depends on things a package cannot assume — how many products, whether they have variants like size and colour, whether stock is tracked, how shipping is calculated, and whether any of it needs to talk to accounting software. Ten products with one price each is a very different build to four hundred with size and colour variants.

So we quote it. R12 000 is a realistic floor for a small, well-built store with local payments and sensible shipping.

Payments, the South African way

This is where most international advice stops being useful. Stripe still does not serve South African businesses the way it does elsewhere, so the practical options are local:

• PayFast — the default. Cards, instant EFT, Mobicred, SnapScan. Widest coverage and the one most South African shoppers recognise.
• Yoco — good if you already take card payments in person and want one dashboard for both.
• Ozow — instant EFT, cheaper per transaction than cards, which matters on higher-value baskets.
• PayJustNow / Payflex — buy-now-pay-later, worth adding if your average basket is over about R1 000.

We set up whichever fits and test it end to end with a real transaction before launch. Full detail in accepting online payments in South Africa.

Before you build a store at all

This is the advice that costs us work, so take it seriously. If you sell fewer than about ten products, or you are testing whether anyone wants them, do not start with a full store.

Start with a small business site and a payment link, or sell through an existing marketplace, and build the store once you know what sells. A store you operate badly because it was more machine than you needed does more damage than no store at all.