Grow Your Business
Emerge Online With Vela.
VelaCommerce is the e-commerce platform for South African businesses — priced in Rands, engineered for our mobile networks, and hosted on our soil. No hidden fees. No checkout that dies on 3G Networks or slow internet connectivity. No wondering where your customers' data actually sits.
Every feature is measured against these three promises — or it is not released.
SA Rand transparency
One flat fee. No hidden costs.
One monthly subscription in South African Rands, plus a transparent take-rate on GMV. Local payments, delivery, POPIA tooling and legal templates are in the core price — not sold back to you as dollar-priced plugins.
Edge-network speed
A checkout that survives 3G.
Mobile-first, aggressively lightweight, tuned for congested networks and mid-range devices. Every gram of JavaScript is justified — because 80%+ cart abandonment on slow connections is a solvable engineering problem, not a customer problem.
Sovereign data
Your customers' data stays home.
Multi-tenant architecture hosted on South African ground, with per-tenant isolation and POPIA-aligned defaults out of the box. Data residency isn't a paid tier — it's the baseline.
If you run a business that is screaming for growth, this platform was built for you.
We built Vela for the business that uses a platform that looses online sales during load-shedding, breaks after every foreign update, and quietly shares customer data offshore. Four specific pains, four specific answers.
Foreign platforms charge in dollars for essentials — payments, delivery, POPIA banners, invoicing.
Paystack, Ozow, Capitec Pay, Pargo, Bob Go and PUDO ship inside the platform, at no extra foreign-currency line-item.
80%+ of mobile customers on 3G give up before completing checkout on legacy sites.
Server-rendered, minimal JS, streamed cart drawer — designed to complete on a weak signal, not just on a fibre laptop.
Platform updates silently break local payment gateways and locker APIs during peak periods.
Local carriers and payment rails are first-class citizens with contract tests — not community plugins that rot between releases.
Nobody can tell you exactly where your customer data is hosted, or how POPIA applies.
Consent tooling, subprocessor list, DPA, PAIA manual and cookie controls are generated per tenant and legally reviewed.
Three tiers. All in SA Rands. Essentials included at every level.
Growth
Tier 3 — Domestic D2C brands & SMBs starting out.
- Shared-schema tenancy (RLS)
- All local payment & delivery rails
- POPIA legal pack + consent banner
- 1.4% GMV take-rate
Commercial
Tier 2 — Mid-market brands (R10M–R30M turnover).
- Isolated schema per tenant
- Advanced API routing & failover
- Priority local engineering support
- 0.9% GMV take-rate
Sovereign
Tier 1 — Parastatals & corporate supply chains.
- Dedicated database node
- Per-tenant KMS & zero-trust perimeter
- Dedicated growth manager
- 0.45% GMV take-rate
No setup fee. No per-seat billing. No foreign-currency line-items for local payments, delivery, legal templates or POPIA tooling — those are in the subscription.
On 3G
Every kilobyte earns its seat.
Server-rendered pages, streamed cart, image formats matched to the device. Because your customer's connection is not your customer's problem.
On sovereignty
Your data has a postcode.
Merchant and consumer PII sits on ZA-resident infrastructure with per-tenant isolation. POPIA subject rights, subprocessors and DPA are surfaced in plain language, not buried.
On rails
Native, not add-on.
Paystack, Ozow, Capitec Pay, Pargo, Bob Go, PUDO and Paxi are hardcoded into the core. When one rail blinks, another routes the customer through.
The payments and logistics your customers already trust.
No dollar-priced plugins. No foreign settlement detours. Vela ships with first-party integrations to the rails your customers actually use — and a failover layer for when any of them blink.
Trade with trust. Emerge with Vela.
Priced in rands, engineered for our networks, hosted on our soil. Whether you're a scaling D2C brand or a public-sector procurement office, you can be selling on Vela this week.