- E-commerce in Africa is shaped by increasing internet and smartphone access, expanding digital payment options and changing consumer behaviour.
- Trust remains critical to e-commerce growth, with secure payments, reliable delivery and transparent returns helping convert online browsers into buyers.
- Performance marketing helps e-commerce businesses reach relevant audiences, measure campaign results and optimise digital advertising spend.
- African e-commerce businesses must adapt to diverse markets, including differences in infrastructure, logistics, payment preferences, languages and consumer needs.
- Sustainable e-commerce growth depends on combining effective digital marketing with a seamless customer experience, relevant content, data-driven decision-making and reliable fulfilment. *
South African brands have been handed a reprieve in the United States, but not certainty. The African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), the US trade programme that has given eligible sub-Saharan African countries duty-free access to the American market since 2000, has been extended to 2028.
That is well short of the 15 years South Africa was pushing for and the US President retains the authority to determine AGOA eligibility every year.
There is more pressure on top of that. A 12.5% tariff under Section 301 of US trade law has applied to South African goods since 24 July. Several products remain exempt – including platinum and other precious metals, various citrus products, fruit juices and nuts. For most exporters, though, the US has become a harder market to plan around.
The smarter growth story lies north, not west. TDMC (The Digital Media Collective), a South African digital agency, services clients in 15 markets and more than 120 brands across Sub-Saharan Africa. The catch is that most brands will get trading north wrong by treating the continent as one market.
Africa’s potential
Speaking in New York on the margins of the UN General Assembly, Wamkele Mene, secretary-general of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), said Africa’s digital economy could generate more than $700 billion by 2035, but that depends on removing the regulatory barriers that stop digital businesses operating across borders.
Those barriers are practical – businesses struggle to receive cross-border payments, verify customers in another country or legally transfer data across borders.
These barriers show up long before customs. For an online brand, crossing into Botswana, Kenya or Zambia is decided at the checkout. The brands that win are the ones that stop treating Africa as a single market and start building for each one.
Our insights are shaped by the agency’s own growth. TDMC recently welcomed CA&S Group as a strategic 30% shareholder, with a pathway to majority ownership, a move that pairs CA&S’s physical route-to-market scale with TDMC’s specialist digital commerce capability across Southern and East Africa.
Five lessons learnt from running e-commerce and media across multiple African markets
1. Price for the shopper, not the spreadsheet
Converting rand prices at the day’s exchange rate is not localisation, says Ingram. “Currency swings, local price anchors and what competitors charge on the ground decide whether a basket converts.”
2. The checkout follows the wallet
Shoppers pay the way they already pay. “If your checkout only offers the payment methods that work in South Africa, you’ve built a store much of the market won’t use,” Ingram explains. Payment preferences differ from country to country, and a checkout that ignores that quietly turns buyers away.
3. Your delivery promise is your brand promise
In e-commerce, reliability carries more weight than price. “A missed delivery window does more damage than a higher price,” says Ingram. Brands should be upfront about how long delivery really takes, what it really costs, and how returns work before the customer clicks buy. “Honest expectations build more trust than optimistic ones.”
4. Platforms don’t travel evenly
Features, ad billing and payment integrations that work at home may not be available, or may behave differently, in another market. “Check before you commit budget,” Ingram advises. “A campaign built on assumptions about platform capability can fail on launch day.”
5. Plan around paydays and data costs
When people get paid, and what it costs them to load your page, shape when and how they shop. As Ingram explains, heavy sites and badly timed campaigns ‘burn money quietly’. Lightweight pages and campaigns timed to local pay cycles protect both the customer’s data bill and the brand’s media spend.
These insights highlight that the focus for brands wanting to extend into Africa shouldn’t be on advertising creative or audience targeting, instead it should be on pricing, payments, logistics, platform capability and the economics of the customer’s own phone.
Cross-border growth is an operations problem dressed up as a marketing one. Brands that fix the checkout first spend far less getting customers to it. The brands that benefit will be the ones that do the work market by market, building a pricing model, a checkout, a delivery promise and a media plan that fit each country’s shoppers.
* Summary created by AI
Cheryl Ingram is CEO of TDMC (The Digital Marketing Collective). TDMC is one of South Africa’s leading e-commerce and performance marketing agencies, with offices in Durban and Cape Town. With over 20 years’ experience in digital marketing, Ingram has helped numerous businesses achieve sustainable growth through innovative digital strategies. Here she shares her perspective on the key trends that are set to shape the industry in 2025.
