The part nobody budgets for
When you pay for software in dollars you do not have a fixed overhead. You have a line item that changes every month for reasons that have nothing to do with how your business performed. You cannot plan against it, and when the rand has a bad quarter your costs rise while your shelf prices stay where they are.
It is worth doing the arithmetic on your own statement. Take your platform subscription, your paid add-ons and any per-transaction cut, convert the lot at today's rate, and compare it against the same month last year. For most merchants the number has moved further than they expected.
Worth checking too: some international platforms add their own fee on top of your payment gateway unless you use theirs — and theirs often does not support South African gateways. Read your plan's terms rather than taking anyone's word for the number, ours included.
The sticker price is rarely the price
Platform pricing usually covers the platform. The things that make a real shop work tend to arrive as separate purchases: product variants, wholesale pricing, loyalty, bookings, stock reporting. Each is small on its own. Billed monthly, in a foreign currency, across five of them, it stops being small.
Add up every software debit order on your statement and ask how many you would still be paying if one system covered the lot.
Paying to fix a problem you should not have
The most avoidable cost appears when you connect an international online store to a till in a South African shop. That means a third-party bridge, and a bridge is a thing that can fail. When it does you sell an item online that walked out the door an hour earlier, and you are into refunds, apologies and manual stock corrections.
You are paying a monthly fee for an integration that exists only because the two systems were never designed to be one. We went into the mechanics of that in why your stock sync keeps breaking.
What we do instead
Fixed pricing, in rands. R199, R450 or R750 per branch per month depending on what you need, VAT inclusive. It does not move when the rand does. The full breakdown is on the pricing page.
No commission on your orders. What you sell through your own online store is yours. You pay your local gateway what your local gateway costs, and nothing on top.
One login, not five. Stock, loyalty, bookings and the till share one back office, so there is no bridge to pay for and nothing to sync.
The reason people stay too long
Almost nobody avoids switching because they love their current platform. They avoid the fortnight of re-uploading product photos, re-typing descriptions and rebuilding collections.
So we removed that. Paste the address of your existing store and our AI reads the live site — products, descriptions, images, structure — and builds it inside Bizzfo for you to review and approve. It works by reading the public front end, so the platform you are on now makes little difference: Shopify, WooCommerce, Wix, Squarespace or something custom all go through the same way.
You check it over before anything goes live. The AI does the typing; you make the decisions.
Want to see your own store inside Bizzfo before committing to anything? Send us the web address on WhatsApp and we will show you what the AI picks up.