Online stores built to take the money.

For most new stores, PayFast or Yoco. Both are widely recognised here, both handle cards and instant EFT, and both are straightforward to get approved for. Ozow is worth adding if a lot of your customers prefer paying straight from their bank. We will talk through the fee structures with you before you sign up for anything, because the cheapest headline rate is not always the cheapest once you look at how your orders actually come in.

Yes, and you should — it is the part of the site you will touch most. We load the first batch, set up the structure for variations, stock and images, then walk you through adding the rest. If you have hundreds of lines in a spreadsheet we import them in bulk rather than making you type them in.

Three to four weeks for a Starter store, six to ten for custom work. Stores take longer than brochure sites mainly because of product data — photographs, descriptions, weights and stock numbers. Having that ready in a spreadsheet before we start is the single biggest thing you can do to shorten it.

On properly specified hosting, yes. The usual failure is not traffic volume but an under-resourced shared host struggling with checkout requests while caching is switched off for the cart. We size the hosting to your expected peak rather than your average, and test it before the day rather than during it.

We set up the parts that live on the site: cookie consent that genuinely holds tracking until it is accepted, a privacy policy matching what the store actually collects, and order data stored where you can export or delete a customer's records on request. The commercial side — registering an information officer, your internal processes — is yours, and we will point you at what is required.

Usually. Products, variations, customers and order history all migrate. The design is rebuilt rather than transferred, and we map redirects from old product URLs so the rankings you have already earned follow you across. Before we quote it we will check whether moving is actually worth it for you — sometimes it is not.

Then say so and we will tell you honestly whether you need a full store at all. For three or four products, a normal site with a payment link often does the job for a fraction of the cost. We would rather build you the right thing than the bigger thing.

People usually mean two halves of one job. Ecommerce website design is what the customer sees — the product pages, the navigation, how the cart and checkout behave. Development is everything behind it: the gateway, the courier rates, the stock, the speed. Split those between two suppliers and the seams show up in the checkout, which is exactly where you cannot afford them. We do both, so there is nobody to hand the problem to.