Have you ever wanted to start your own small business in South Africa? Well, this is your sign to do it and we have all the best advice so keep reading on. It may seem scary at first but we promise it’s worth it and the hardest step is just deciding to do it! Let's begin:
1. What Should I Sell?
First things first! You need to decide what product or service you want to sell. Do you have a talent or passion for baking, drawing, web design, or even life advice? Maybe you’d prefer to resell products or make a marketplace for others' products or services.
Whatever you choose, make sure to do your research on that specific industry and become familiar with the competition and the market you're entering as some are already quite saturated, in which case you need to brainstorm ways to stand out from your competition so buyers pick you, whether that's through lower prices or unique branding.
2. Find Stock or Supplies
If you’re going to be selling products that you aren't making yourself, you first need to source them! This can be a challenge, especially during Covid as importing and transporting goods can be challenging and expensive. Our insider tip is to find products you love on social media and try approaching those brands directly to see if they do wholesale.
Hiring someone to handle the importation of your goods is also a good idea if you can afford to as they can save you a lot of time and money when dealing with customs and logistics.
Make sure to get your importer's code from SARS if you plan on importing more than 3 times per year, it's quick and easy and will prevent you from being targeted by customs charging higher duties.
If you're going to be making your own products then spend some time finding quality materials and tools at the best price. Try to enquire about wholesale discounts for materials if you plan on buying bulk as this will save you a lot in the long run. In a small business, every few Rand saved makes a difference!
3. Funding
The hardest part may be to find funding. We know it's tough but you need to believe in yourself and remember that nothing good ever came without some risk.
You can take out a loan, borrow from family or friends, use your savings or find investors. Make sure you keep a detailed list of all your expected and actual costs throughout the process so you can budget properly.
4. Logo
Step 4 is to design your logo. You can easily create your own using free tools such as Canva, just Google 'free logo maker' and plenty of sites will come up. You could also hire a professional, we found an amazing designer through Instagram which is a great way to support other small businesses. Try to make your logo bright and impactful, the more memorable it is the better for your brand, but make sure it's not too cluttered or it will confuse your audience. Great design strikes the perfect balance between simplicity and ingenuity. We also recommend developing a colour palette of about 3-4 colours that you use in your logo and carry through to your website, packaging and social media platforms. A good tip is to Google colours associated with your product or certain emotions you want your brand to evoke. Red has been shown to remind people of food in psychological studies, which is why most food companies have red logos.
Make sure you create a logo or multiple logos that will look good on your website as well as on social media. This means it needs to fit into a circle for your Instagram and Facebook logos.
5. Packaging
Step 5 if you're selling a physical product is packaging, and this one is more important than you think, but gives you a lot of room for creativity which is fun. You’ll need to make sure to make your customer feel like they're being spoiled while keeping your costs as low as possible, so do your research. Bonus points if it's sustainable! We made a Pinterest board with all our favourite packaging and then consolidated those ideas into our favourite elements which we adapted for our business
Make sure you think of boxes, thank you cards, bubble wrap and whatever else you may need to package your product. If you're shipping nationally or internationally you also need to consider protecting your products sufficiently and how they'll look when they arrive at your customer. The last thing we want is for our customers to receive battered and damaged parcels!
6. Courier
Step 6 is to organise a courier service! Again this only applies if you're selling a physical product like jewellery in our case. This was the most confusing step for us as there wasn't much help online for South Africa in particular, but we're here to help you.
You should research the cheapest options by reaching out to a few companies and asking for pricing lists. We went with the Courier Guy and have a dedicated blog post on setting up your account with them and sending off your first order.
Make sure you check with them that the type of product you're transporting is allowed and all the special considerations for your particular product, for example, food needs to be kept cold and stay fresh and art may be fragile and need to be packaged in a certain way.
Also, think about whether you're only going to ship locally or internationally, and all the implications of that like insurance, cost and delivery time.
7. Social Media
Step 7 is to start your social media pages. Whether you're selling a service or a product, it’s the best way to get the word out about your small business and it’s completely free!
We recommend creating Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and TikTok accounts, but that's a lot to handle at once so Facebook and Instagram are a great place to start, as you can post the same content to both platforms by linking them.
We recommend you focus on creating great content you love, but it can be hard and time-consuming! The trick is to not get attached to everything you post and to not put yourself under pressure, you’ll get better at it the more you practice and social media moves so quickly that each post will be forgotten before you know it. We treat social media as a practical tutorial and try to learn a lesson and grow from each post, and before you know it you'll be a pro. Our tip is to be consistent and to have fun with it, you're supposed to be bad at it initially and the only way to improve is to do it until you're good at it. Once you're comfortable with Instagram and Facebook posts and stories, you can move on to creating videos for reels and TikTok. This is a fantastic way to get your brand out there.
A pro tip: Use hashtags in the caption of every post. You get 30 per post so use all of them! Vary them between super specific ones like #enamelhuggies and super general ones like #southafrica to increase your chances of being discovered by searches.
Make sure to follow and engage with other brands and your followers as much as possible, you want to create a community. Reply to all your messages and comments as quickly as possible, even after hours, that's just the reality of owning your own business.
If this all seems too overwhelming, and we completely understand, you can hire people or a company to run your social media for you. It will free up a lot of your time and give your business a more professional look but you have to weigh up the costs.
8. Website
You may or may not decide to have a website, a lot of successful businesses choose not to while others use it as their primary sales channel, the choice is yours. Perhaps you sell a service like manicures and all you need is social media and bookings can be done through DMs, then a website may be pointless and expensive. For businesses like ours though, our main source of sales is our website as it provides customers with a catalogue of our products 24/7 at the touch of. a button.
There are some amazing website-building tools out there like Wix, Shopify and WordPress that allow you to build a website without touching any code! We use Wix because it’s the cheapest by far and they don’t take a percentage of your sales like Shopify which is a huge money-saver, especially for a small business.
A great option is also Etsy if you’d like to keep your store small and costs low.
Professional companies can also be hired to build a website for you, although this can be pricey once again and you lose control of being able to customise and load products to your store.
9. Link Your Website to Facebook Shopping
If you’re selling products, you should link the products on your website to Instagram and Facebook so that when people see your photos they can tap them to purchase the products shown. Instagram/Facebook shopping is a fantastic way to increase sales. They estimate that Instagram will generate about $10 billion in revenue in 2021, so you don't want to miss out on that! If you need more advice on how to set this up we have a blog post on that coming soon.
10. Link to A Payment Gateway
Last but certainly not least, you need to link your website to a payment gateway such as Payfast or Peach Payments to sell products and make money. We will have a dedicated blog post on how to set this up in South Africa specifically.
Now you can put all the pieces together, go out there and accept orders and you are officially a small business owner! Congratulations and good luck!
Let us know if you have any specific questions in the comments.
Tash
xxx
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