How to Start an Online Store in South Africa: Costs, Platforms & Payment Gateways

Selling online in South Africa is far more accessible than it was five years ago, but the decisions you make in the first week (platform, payment gateway, shipping) are the ones that are painful to undo later. Here’s how we’d approach it.

What it actually costs

Budget for these separately, because quotes that bundle everything into one number tend to hide the ongoing costs:

• The store build: from around R15 000 for a straightforward store, rising with product count and custom features
• Domain: roughly R100 to R200 per year
• Hosting: monthly or annual, and worth more than the cheapest option for a store (see Atomic Hosting)
• Payment gateway: no monthly fee with most SA providers, but a percentage per transaction
• Product photography: often underestimated, and often the difference between a store that converts and one that doesn’t
• Ongoing: maintenance, security updates, and stock or content changes

There’s more detail on build pricing in our guide to what a website costs in South Africa.

Choosing a platform

WooCommerce

WordPress plus WooCommerce remains the most common choice locally, and it’s what we build most often. You own everything, every South African payment gateway has a plugin for it, and there’s no monthly platform fee or per-sale commission. The trade-off is that you’re responsible for hosting, updates and security, so it needs either a bit of comfort on your part or someone maintaining it.

Shopify

Genuinely excellent, and the fastest route to a working store. You pay a monthly subscription in dollars, which fluctuates with the rand, and you’re working within Shopify’s structure rather than your own. If you want to focus purely on selling and not think about technical maintenance at all, it’s a reasonable trade.

Custom build

Worth it when you need something the off-the-shelf platforms genuinely can’t do: unusual product configurators, subscription logic, or integration with existing systems. Not worth it for a standard product catalogue.

For most South African small businesses selling physical products, WooCommerce hits the best balance of cost, control and local payment support.

Payment gateways: the part people get wrong

This decision has a direct, permanent effect on your margins, so it’s worth a few minutes. Approximate rates at the time of writing (always confirm current pricing directly, as these change):

PayFast sits at roughly 3.2% + R2 on card payments, with instant EFT around 2%. It supports the widest range of payment methods and is the default choice for a lot of SA stores.

Yoco is around 2.6% online. If you already use Yoco card machines in a physical shop, keeping everything with one provider makes reconciliation much simpler. It doesn’t support EFT, so customers have to pay by card.

Ozow specialises in instant EFT with fees as low as roughly 1.5%. Because payments come straight from a bank account, chargeback risk largely disappears, which matters if you sell high-value items.

The setup most SA stores end up with

Cards through PayFast, instant EFT through Ozow. It costs nothing extra to offer both, and conversion is usually better because a meaningful share of South African shoppers prefer EFT and will abandon a checkout that only accepts cards. If your average order value is high, the difference between 1.5% and 3.2% on the EFT portion adds up quickly.

Shipping, and the thing that kills conversions

Unexpected shipping costs at checkout are the single most common reason carts get abandoned. Decide early between free shipping above a threshold (the cost baked into your pricing), flat-rate shipping, or live rates from a courier. Local couriers like The Courier Guy and Aramex integrate with WooCommerce, and PUDO-style locker collection has become genuinely popular for lower-value orders.

Whatever you pick, show the cost as early as possible. A surprise at the final step costs you the sale.

Legal requirements you can’t skip

Selling online in South Africa means you’re subject to the Consumer Protection Act and the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act, which give buyers a cooling-off period on most online purchases. You’ll need clear terms and conditions, a refund and returns policy, and a POPIA-compliant privacy policy, since you’re collecting customer names, addresses and contact details.

If you don’t already have these documents, POPIA Ready generates them for South African businesses. There’s more on the compliance side in our POPIA guide.

Before you launch

• Test a real transaction end to end with an actual card, not just the sandbox
• Check the entire checkout on a phone, since that’s where most of your traffic will be
• Confirm order confirmation emails actually arrive and aren’t landing in spam
• Set up Google Analytics before launch, not after, so you have baseline data
• Write real product descriptions rather than pasting the supplier’s, which helps you rank and helps you sell

Start smaller than you think

The most common mistake we see is trying to launch with 200 products, every payment method, and a custom loyalty programme. Launch with your best-selling range, one solid payment setup, and clear shipping. Get real orders, learn what customers actually ask for, then expand. It’s far cheaper to add features to a store that’s already selling than to guess up front.

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Thinking about selling online? Tell us what you’re planning and we’ll give you an honest view on the right platform and a fixed quote, with no obligation.