Basic
R12 000
4 to 5 weeks
- Up to 20 products
- One payment gateway
- Flat-rate delivery
- Order emails
- Staff walkthrough
Centurion · Serving all of South Africa
Online stores from R12 000, published rather than quoted on request. Payfast and Yoco checkouts, live stock that will not oversell, and courier rules that stop delivery quietly eating your margin. Every account opened in your name.
Before you spend anything
The build is the part everybody quotes on. It is not the part that catches people out. An ecommerce website in South Africa has a second cost that runs forever, and if nobody explains it to you before you start, your margin disappears somewhere between the checkout and the courier.
Every card payment costs you a percentage. Payfast and Yoco both sit around the low single digits per transaction, and that comes off every single sale for as long as the store exists. Delivery is the second one: if you charge a flat R99 and the courier charges you R180 to get a heavy item to Polokwane, you have just paid a customer to buy from you. Then there is hosting, the domain, and somebody's time to actually pack and send things.
We would rather you know all of that on the first call than discover it in month three. If the numbers do not work — if your margin is too thin to survive card fees and courier costs — we will say so, and you can spend the money on something else.
Once-off · ZAR
These are the same prices published on our full rate card. Hosting, the domain and the payment gateway are opened in your name and billed to you directly, so nothing is hidden inside our fee and nothing is held hostage if you leave.
Choosing the platform
There are three realistic online selling platforms for a South African business, and the honest answer is that the right one depends on your catalogue and who has to run the shop on a Tuesday afternoon — not on which one an agency prefers to build.
| Platform | Ongoing cost | Suits | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| WooCommerce | Hosting only, roughly R150–R600 a month | Most South African small businesses. Full control, no per-sale platform cut. | It is yours to maintain. Plugins need updating, and a neglected WooCommerce store gets hacked. |
| Shopify | From about US$25 a month, plus fees | Shops that want zero maintenance and a big app ecosystem. | Shopify Payments does not operate in South Africa, so you must connect a local gateway like Payfast — and Shopify then adds its own third-party transaction fee on top, up to 2% depending on your plan. |
| Built from scratch | Hosting only | Unusual products, custom pricing rules, or integration with software you already run. | More expensive up front, and only worth it when an off-the-shelf platform genuinely cannot do the job. |
For most people who ask us about ecommerce web design, WooCommerce wins on cost over three years. We will still tell you to use Shopify if your situation calls for it — we do not earn more either way.
The parts that actually break
Payfast, Yoco, Ozow or Peach — connected to a merchant account in your name so the money lands in your bank, not ours. EFT and instant-EFT options included, because plenty of South Africans still will not put a card into a website.
Weight and zone based courier rules, or flat rate if your products are uniform. Set up so a heavy order to a far province is priced properly instead of being quietly subsidised by you.
Stock counts down as orders come in and the product goes out of stock by itself. Overselling one item you do not have costs you a refund, an apology and usually a review.
Proper titles, descriptions, image alt text and Product schema, so your items can appear in Google Shopping and normal search results without you paying for every click.
Most South African shopping traffic is mobile. The checkout is tested on a real phone on a slow connection, because that is where carts get abandoned.
A walkthrough with whoever will actually add products, plus written notes. If you need us afterwards you can call us, but you should not have to.
Never sold online before
If you want to sell online in South Africa, the order below is the one that saves people money. Most of it has nothing to do with the website.
Where we work
The studio is at 214 Theo Street, Wierdapark, Centurion, so Gauteng clients can sit down with us before committing to a build. Johannesburg is under an hour away and we do the first meeting in person whenever it helps.
Everything after that works remotely, which is how we build stores for businesses across South Africa. Nothing about ecommerce website development requires us to be in the same room as your stock.
Straight answers
Centurion, Gauteng
Send us the product list and roughly what you charge, and we will tell you what the store would cost, what the fees will take, and whether selling online actually makes sense for your margin. That conversation costs nothing.
Also see: selling online, explained simply · every package and price · SEO services