When is Shopify payments going to be available in South Africa? My store deals with international clients and its clear from speaking to my clients that not seeing their currency in checkout is very unsettling
Shopify doesn’t publish dates for new Shopify Payments countries, so I wouldn’t sit and wait on it for South Africa.
The good news is you can fix the thing your clients are actually reacting to right now without it. The unsettling part is them not seeing their own currency at checkout, and that’s a Markets setting, not a Shopify Payments one. You can turn on local currency display for ZAR through Markets and pair it with a third-party gateway that works in SA (PayFast and Peach Payments are the common ones) to handle the actual processing. Customers see ZAR, you still get paid, and you’re not waiting on Shopify’s roadmap.
The tradeoff is you lose the native Shopify Payments rates and the single-dashboard convenience, so it’s worth a quick math check on volume.
Are most of your clients actually in SA, or spread across a few currencies? That changes whether one gateway covers it or you need proper multi-currency.
Thank you for the detailed response — really appreciate it. However, my situation is a bit different: none of my customers are based in South Africa. My store sells to international collectors, primarily in the USA, Europe, and Australia. So while the ZAR display fix via Markets is helpful to know about, my customers will still be checking out in ZAR regardless, and relying on their banks to convert — which is the friction I’m trying to eliminate.
The PayFast/Peach Payments route makes sense for stores with local SA customers, but doesn’t really move the needle for me. Is there any third-party gateway available to SA-based merchants that can actually process in multiple currencies (USD, EUR, GBP, AUD) rather than just displaying them?
Hello there @ElementalTreasure
A lot of South African merchants have been requesting Shopify Payments but the company has yet to announce any date of release. In the meantime, you can also improve your customer experience with Shopify Markets and enable local currencies on a third party gateway payment supported. This lets customers shop, and in many cases checkout, in their own currency, which reduces confusion and helps build trust with international buyers. Also double-check your Market settings for whether the Price and Location is set up for each region.