How to create an online store in South Africa

Setting up a Shopify store, step by step

1. 1

   Sign up and pick a plan

   Shopify's plans are billed monthly in US dollars, tiered by feature set. You'll need a plan before you can publish a store, even to test it.

2. 2

   Choose and customise a theme

   Shopify's theme store has free and paid options. Customising one properly, colours, fonts, layout, usually means either learning Shopify's theme editor or paying a developer.

3. 3

   Add your products

   Every product gets added manually: photos, descriptions, prices, variants. If you're already selling on Instagram, this means re-typing everything you've already posted.

4. 4

   Set up payments

   Shopify Payments (Shopify's own built-in processor) is not available for South African sellers. You'll need to connect a third-party gateway instead, and pay whatever that gateway charges on top of Shopify's own fees.

5. 5

   Set up shipping and tax

   You'll configure shipping zones and rates yourself, and decide how (or whether) you handle VAT.

6. 6

   Launch and drive your own traffic

   Shopify gives you a store. It doesn't give you customers. Every visitor has to come from somewhere you already control, ads, social, search, email.

What it actually costs

Shopify's own subscription is only one part of the bill. In South Africa specifically, you're also looking at: a third-party payment gateway's fees (since Shopify Payments isn't available here), the exchange-rate exposure of paying a USD-denominated subscription every month regardless of how much you actually sold, and, if you want anything Shopify doesn't do out of the box, WhatsApp checkout, local instant EFT, importing a catalogue you've already built on Instagram, the cost of a paid app or a developer to bolt it on.

None of that makes Shopify a bad product. It's built for sellers setting up a store, and a catalogue, from scratch, and for that job it's genuinely capable. The cost only stops making sense when that's not actually the job you have.

Is Shopify the right fit for you?

If you're building a brand from nothing, no products posted anywhere yet, and you want full control over a custom storefront, Shopify is a reasonable place to start.

If you're already selling, in your Instagram DMs, in a WhatsApp chat, from a Facebook post, and the actual problem is "how do I take payment and look legitimate" rather than "how do I build a store," the Shopify setup above solves a problem you don't have, at a cost you don't need to pay.