1. Research and what products to sell
If you don’t already own a brick and mortar store and don’t produce your own products, it can be quite difficult coming up with an idea to what to sell online. Trust me, I’ve been there. So, how do you decide what to sell if you don’t know?
You can start with research and find out what sells well in South Africa. The main thing here is to remember not to jump head first in to a competitive market like fashion. It is super competitive and you are going to struggle to beat the more established retailers.
Rather focus on a niche specific part of fashion like baby undies or baby boxers. This is very specific and it will help dial in your marketing strategy.
Don’t just jump at the first opportunity that comes your way, remember you are going to spend money for products and probably marketing too. Test the waters with friends and family, if they like it start with a small quantity of stock before releasing your store in to the wild.
You can always use Google trends to see what trends at the moment. This helps a lot to build stores around trendy products.
If you don’t want to follow trends and would rather focus on your passions, this is a great way to help you decide but you should still do enough research around the products.
If you can sell products with high-demand and low competition, you have a winner. It does not matter if you have passion for the product and no one is looking for it or the competition is so high your online store does not stand a chance of ranking on popular search engines like Google or Bing.
Building the store is not the issue here, it is the easy part. I will show you how in a minute. The main issue is for you to understand what you are selling and to whom you are going to sell it to.
This should be your main focus before worrying about technology.
Cost and shipping
Don’t undercut yourself, make sure you know your product in and out. The margins you have to play with when running promotions on your store and most importantly what shipping are you going to use and the cost.
There are multiple companies you can use in South Africa and the ones I can recommend and used myself are –
The choices are unlimited and some companies will give you a better rate when you reach minimum orders of R5000 or so.
2. What is the best platform to start an online store in South Africa?
There is no doubt that we are spoilt rotten when it comes to choosing platforms we can sell products on, some good and some not so much. I have been around the block a couple of times and I can honestly say you have two viable options here.
Keep in mind both will cost money and you get what you pay for especially if you go for a free platform.
Option 1:
WordPress and WooCommerce. Both these platforms are open source and free to use. This option is great for someone starting out with a limited budget and the willingness to learn a new skill. I also have to add here, it will take some time getting used to as you will have to put in the hours to figure things out. Luckily, the community and the tutorials around WordPress and WooCommerce are very helpful, and I am pretty sure you will find what you’re looking for by doing a quick search on YouTube.
WordPress works by installing themes and I can recommend one theme and that is the Flatsome theme. It is the number one e-commerce theme for WordPress.
Why the Flatsome theme?
Well, for starters if you have a limited budget you can get your hands on the theme for a once of fee of $59. This is a major advantage over multiple online stores charging a monthly fee plus transactional fees.
So, What will the Flatsome theme build on WordPress set me back every month? This is a great question and for most people starting out not sure if they will be able to afford monthly payment. You don’t have to worry about anything because your store won’t cost you a cent.
That is right, if you don’t sell anything your store won’t cost you a thing. You have to remember WordPress is self-hosted and you will need hosting for your store and this will cost a few Rands a month.
If you are going local (co.za) I can, prefer a company called Domains. You can get some hosting from them for as little a R100 a month. This will also include a free domain worth R90 plus a free SSL certificate.
Another point to mention here is that every payment gateway in South Africa works by making their money from charging you a fee per transaction happening on your website. So, this is also important to remember when choosing a platform.
What features does Flatsome theme have?
This is where the Flatsome theme shines. You will be able to build an amazing store without any special skills and coding knowledge. It makes use of UX builder which is a revolutionary front end builder.
These tools will let you build awesome looking pages, sliders, banners and super fast product pages all on the front end. What this means is, You can see your changes in real time.
This is not all, the Flatsome theme comes with a library of 30 content elements, 9 shop elements and 5 layout elements. This is a major as it will make it effortless for anyone to drag and drop an element and create whatever they want.
The Flatsome theme is also optimized for SEO and loads super fast to give the ultimate user experience. The theme also comes with loads of “how to documentation and videos” to help anyone figure out if something is tripping them up.
Try out the Flatsome theme here.
