Online stores built to convert
Custom e-commerce websites for South African businesses. South African payment, South African shipping, South African scale.
E-Commerce in South Africa
WeMakeSites builds custom e-commerce stores for South African businesses from R15,000. We integrate the payment gateways your customers expect — PayFast, Yoco, Stripe, Peach, Ozow — and the shipping partners local logistics actually runs on (Bob Go, Courier Guy, Aramex, Pargo, PUDO, Postnet). Stores are built on modern e-commerce stacks (Shopify, WooCommerce, or custom-headless on Next.js for larger catalogues), tuned for fast load times even on mobile 4G, and structured with product, organisation and offer schema for SEO. Customer accounts, wishlists, abandoned-cart recovery, inventory management, sales analytics and order processing are standard. Most stores go live in 4–6 weeks. Care plans from R549/month cover ongoing security, updates, payment issues and product management support.
Why this matters
South African e-commerce has its own quirks that international platforms get wrong. International Shopify themes don't ship with PayFast or Yoco out of the box. They don't integrate with Bob Go's address-validation API. They don't handle the courier-not-collected scenarios that PUDO and Courier Guy throw, and they certainly don't speak to the SARS VAT rules around digital goods. Stores built without local context lose money to failed payments, return-to-sender shipments, and tax surprises.
We build with that context in mind. Every store we ship integrates the payment methods your customers actually use, the couriers that actually deliver to them, and the workflows that actually fit South African retail (cash-on-delivery for some markets, EFT for B2B, partial refunds for damaged goods, consignment store flows where relevant).
We also tune aggressively for mobile conversion. South African e-commerce traffic is over 75% mobile, often on patchy networks. A bloated international theme with 5MB of JavaScript will bleed conversions on mobile. Our stores ship on minimum-viable JS, with images served as WebP/AVIF, and pages streaming the critical above-fold content first. The result is stores that actually convert at industry-benchmark rates (2–4% for new ventures, 5–8% for tuned operators).
We're platform-agnostic — we'll recommend Shopify for most starting catalogues under 500 SKUs, WooCommerce for content-heavy stores or unusual flows, or custom-headless Next.js + commerce backend for stores expecting serious scale or unusual requirements. The recommendation comes from your needs, not what we like building.
What's included
How we work
Discovery
We map your products, customer flows, payment and shipping needs. Platform recommendation (Shopify, WooCommerce or custom).
Design
Custom storefront design in Figma, optimised for mobile conversion. Two rounds of revisions.
Build
Storefront built, products imported, payment + shipping connected. Test orders run end-to-end.
QA
Real-world testing — order placement, payment flow, shipping label generation, refunds, customer comms.
Launch
Go live, point your domain, monitor first orders. We stay close for the first 30 days to catch any edge cases.
Larger catalogues, custom checkout, B2B portals or marketplace builds quoted separately.
Best for
We've delivered e-commerce for clients across:
E-Commerce in your city
Detailed pages with city-specific context, pricing and FAQs. Same scope, same pricing as nationwide.
Where we serve
We deliver this service to clients across all 9 South African provinces. Same scope, same pricing, same turnaround nationwide.
Frequently asked questions
Related services
Tell us what you're building
Free 30-minute call to scope your project. We'll come back with a fixed-price quote and a real timeline — usually within a day.