Selling online shouldn’t be complicated. But too many South African businesses lose sales every day to clunky checkouts, broken payment integrations, and stores that were never built with the customer in mind.
Still Waters Digital designs and builds e-commerce websites that make buying easy — and selling even easier. WooCommerce and Shopify stores with local payment gateways, courier integration, and checkouts engineered to stop shoppers abandoning their carts.
Most abandoned carts aren’t lost to price. They’re lost to friction:
Every one of these is a design decision — which means every one is fixable. We build stores around the shopper’s decision, from the first product photo to the payment confirmation screen.
From storefront design to post-launch optimisation — everything built for how South Africans actually shop and pay.
First impressions drive purchases.
We design online stores that feel trustworthy, look professional, and guide shoppers from browsing to buying without friction — on any device.
Getting paid should be seamless — for you and your customers.
We configure your store for the way South Africans actually shop and pay.
Turn interest into an order.
We structure your product pages to do one job well — persuasive descriptions, trust signals near the buy button, clear stock and delivery information, and photography guidance so your products look as good online as they do in hand.
Launching your store is the beginning, not the end.
We track performance, identify where customers drop off, and make data-driven improvements that steadily lift your conversion rate and average order value.
There’s no universally “best” platform — only the best fit for your products, processes and budget. We build on both, so our advice isn’t biased by what we happen to sell.
WooCommerce runs on WordPress, which makes it powerful, flexible and fully in your control.
Shopify is a hosted platform that trades some flexibility for simplicity and stability.
Not sure which suits you? That’s a fifteen-minute conversation. Get in touch and we’ll give you a straight recommendation — including “keep what you have”, if that’s the honest answer.
You don’t always need a rebuild. If your existing WooCommerce or Shopify store gets traffic but not orders, we can audit it and fix what’s leaking:
A store audit is included in our free website audit — request one and we’ll tell you whether you need fixes or a fresh build.
Discover — your products, margins, fulfilment process and customers
Plan — platform choice, catalogue structure, payment and shipping logic
Design — storefront and product page design around the buying decision
Build — development, gateway and courier integration, VAT setup
Test — real transactions, on real devices, before a single customer arrives
Launch & grow — tracking live from day one, then ongoing optimisation
You’ll also get training on managing products, orders and stock yourself — you shouldn’t need us for daily operations.
Local gateways, local couriers, VAT and rand pricing handled properly, not bolted on.
Design decisions justified by how shoppers behave, not by fashion.
You own your store, your domain and your data.
Design, build, SEO and reporting under one roof, so your store is found as well as functional.
Through our WordPress maintenance plans for WooCommerce stores, or ad-hoc support for Shopify.
It depends on your catalogue size, platform and integrations — a twenty-product WooCommerce store is a different project from a multi-warehouse operation. We quote each build individually, itemised in rand, after a short discovery conversation. No hidden costs, no surprise "plugin fees" later.
Neither is universally better. WooCommerce offers ownership, flexibility and lower running costs; Shopify offers simplicity and hands-off hosting. Both support South African payment gateways. The right answer depends on your products, technical comfort and growth plans — we build on both and will recommend honestly.
The most widely used are PayFast, Peach Payments, Yoco and PayGate — all supporting cards, instant EFT and increasingly popular options like SnapScan and Zapper. We'll recommend a gateway based on your transaction volumes and fee structures, then integrate and test it properly.
A focused store typically takes four to eight weeks from kickoff to launch, depending on catalogue size and integrations. Larger or more custom builds take longer. We'll give you a realistic timeline upfront — and stick to it.
Yes — we configure shipping with South African couriers such as The Courier Guy and Aramex, and pickup-point options like Pargo, with live rates or flat-rate zones depending on your setup.
Yes — that's the point. We hand over with training on products, orders, stock and discounts. You run the store; we're on hand for the technical side through a maintenance plan or as needed.
Yes. We migrate products, customers, order history and SEO redirects, and we plan the cutover so your store doesn't lose rankings or go dark mid-trade.
Every store we build ships with clean technical foundations — product schema, fast pages, crawlable structure. To actively compete for rankings, pair the build with our SEO service; e-commerce SEO is a discipline of its own and one of the highest-ROI investments a store can make.
Whether you’re launching your first store or fixing one that leaks sales, start with a conversation. We’ll give you a straight recommendation and a clear, itemised quote.
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