Guide ยท Online stores
If you have never sold anything on the internet, start here. No jargon, nothing assumed. By the end of this page you will understand what an online store is, how the money reaches your bank, and how people find you.
Live 3D — move your cursor through it
An online store is a website that does three jobs: it shows your products, it takes the money, and it tells you where to send the parcel. That is all. Everything else you hear about is just a detail attached to one of those three jobs.
If you can describe your products, price them, and pack a box, you already understand most of it.
This is the part that worries most people, so here it is step by step. A customer types their card details into your checkout. Those details do not go to you. They go straight to a payment gateway, which in South Africa is usually Payfast or Yoco. The gateway checks with the bank that the money is there and takes it.
The money then sits with the gateway for a day or three, and gets paid into your normal business bank account. You never see or store a card number, which is exactly what you want, because storing card numbers is a legal minefield.
If your site does not know you only have three of something, it will happily sell ten. Then you are phoning seven people to apologise.
Live stock means the site counts down as orders come in and stops selling when you hit zero. Set this up on day one. It is the single most common thing small stores skip, and the single most common reason their customers get angry.
A flat delivery fee sounds simple and will cost you. Sending a parcel to the next suburb and sending it to a farm outside Upington are not the same price.
The fix is courier rules: the site works out the fee from the weight of the order and the area it is going to. You set the areas once. After that the site quotes the right price every time, and you stop paying the difference out of your profit.
SEO means search engine optimisation. Strip away the mystery and it is this: Google reads the words on your site and decides what you sell. If your product page says Model 4471 and your customer searches for a wooden train kit for kids, Google cannot connect the two.
So you write the words your customers actually use. You give every product a real description. You make sure the site loads fast on a cheap phone, because Google measures that too.
Be realistic about time. SEO takes two to three months to show anything. Anyone promising page one next week is selling you something else.
SEO is traffic you do not pay for, and it builds slowly. Paid ads on Facebook or Google are traffic you rent. It starts the day you pay and stops the day you stop.
Most small stores need both. Ads to make sales this month while the SEO is still waking up. If you only have money for one at the start, run ads, learn which products people actually want, then write your SEO around those.
Words you will hear from anyone in this industry, in plain English.
No. We can build the store while you photograph and price things. But nothing goes live until at least a few products are loaded properly, because a half-empty shop loses trust immediately.
Three to four weeks for a standard build. Most of the delay is usually waiting on product photos and descriptions from your side, not the code.
Yes, and you should. You get a login and a walkthrough on handover. If you have to phone a developer to change a price, you have been sold the wrong thing.
Sometimes not. With very few products, a simple page plus a WhatsApp order button often sells more and costs far less. We will tell you if that is your situation.
Send a message describing what you sell. If this is the wrong thing for your business, you will be told so — that is cheaper for both of us than the wrong build.