Custom Online Shop Development in South Africa

Custom-built shops start from R15,000 with Horn Dev. Platform-based shops on Shopify or Wix can be cheaper upfront, but you pay monthly (R300–R600/month on Shopify) and you don't own the platform — we do. A custom-built shop has no ongoing platform fee, and because it's built the right way, it can rank on Google in a way platform shops usually can't.

A PayFast account (free to register, ~3.5% per transaction), a product catalogue, a way to handle orders, and a shop that people can find. We set up all of it — you just need to have your products ready and your banking details for PayFast verification.

Yes — this is included as standard, not an extra. Products live in a Supabase database with a simple dashboard, so you can add, update, and remove products yourself without needing a developer every time.

That's the point of building it the way we do. Most platforms generate product pages that Google has to render with JavaScript before it can read them — that delays indexing and limits ranking. We build product pages as static HTML, the same way Google reads a standard website, so every product can rank individually for what people search for.

Yes. Some businesses prefer to take enquiries and orders through WhatsApp rather than process payments online — we can build a full product catalogue that sends orders to WhatsApp instead of a checkout. You can also have both: a full PayFast checkout for standard products and a WhatsApp flow for custom or quote-based items.

Free online store builders and shop makers exist, but they come with platform branding, transaction fees on top of PayFast's, and product pages that are harder for Google to index — see the comparison above. If you're testing an idea before committing budget, a free builder is a reasonable starting point; once you're actually selling, a custom-built store usually pays for itself in the search traffic a free builder can't get you.