Hi
Many thanks for sharing that.
A point of confusion with your situation:
As I understood it, you want to primarily sell to South Africans, in ZAR;
South African Shopify stores can only have 1 currency, which is what the customer sees during checkout
(You can use an app to show multiple currencies, but the customer then still sees your primary currency during checkout),
thus you have to choose between ZAR or USD.
If you’re selling mostly internationally, the ZAR might throw them,
if you’re selling mostly to South Africans, the USD might throw them.
Thus I can understand why you might want to create 2 separate stores:
1 to market internationally, and
1 to market in South Africa.
(I wonder if the USA Shopify accounts, which apparently support multiple currencies – the South African ones don’t without an app – would solve this problem for you).
In our case, we were selling mostly internationally (and pretty much not to South Africa at all), so it did not make any sense whatsoever for us to sell in ZAR,
whereas you seem to be the other way round: you want to avoid USD.
With 2Checkout, it’s still unclear on whether they can even support a store with ZAR as their primary currency?
Anyway, interesting stuff.
Yes this has been a total nightmare.
Because of this, I don’t think I can recommend Shopify for South African ecommerce;
but at the same time, I’m not sure what the best alternative will be.
Best of luck 