Can I use Webflow Ecommerce in South Africa?
South Africa is an entrepreneurial country with amazing ideas! It is home to a lot of small to medium business owners, selling everything from interior woodwork to boutique clothes. But how do we, without using code, take our businesses online?
At the moment Webflow's Ecommerce only support payments with Stripe and Paypal. That is some boundaries we will have to work within. Luckly, there are some workarounds!
Stripe
Having a look at stripe.com/global we can see that Stripe isn't (yet) supported in South Africa, although Stripe support the currency - South African Rand (ZAR). So when entering a South African business address there will be an error, "Your business address country isn't supported by Stripe".
Workaround for Stripe
An alternative is to use Stripe Atlas. With Stipe Atlas you can quickly incorporate a U.S. company and set up a U.S. bank account. You can then connect your Stripe account to your Webflow Ecommerce store and receive payments.
PayPal
Opposite from Stripe, PayPal is supported in South Africa, although it does not support the currency ZAR, and we get an error message saying, "Your store currency is not supported by PayPal".
Workaround for PayPal
What we can do is to set our Ecommerce store currency to a different currency, like USD, so quite simple workaround. The limitations although is all of the products prices will be shown in USD, and if we haven't integrated Stripe, PayPal will me the only way for customers to pay.
Which payment gateway do you want to see next?
That said, it’s worth noting that Webflow probably plans to add more payment options to expand their reach for businesses who would prefer to use other payment gateways.
To influence there decision, you can add your desired payment gateway as a Wishlist Item so Webflow's developers know what we want to see in South Africa next.
https://wishlist.webflow.com/