TDMC CEO warns brands must adapt e-commerce operations per African market, not treat continent as one

There is more pressure on top of that. A 12.5% tariff under Section 301 of US trade law has applied to South African goods since 24 July. Several products remain exempt, including platinum and other precious metals, various citrus products, fruit juices and nuts. For most exporters, though, the US has become a harder market to plan around.

The smarter growth story lies north, not west, argues Cheryl Ingram, CEO of TDMC (The Digital Media Collective), a leading South African digital agency that services clients in 15 markets and more than 120 brands across sub-Saharan Africa. “The catch,” warns Ingram, “is that most brands will get trading north wrong by treating the continent as one market.”

Africa’s potential

Speaking in New York on the margins of the UN General Assembly, Wamkele Mene, Secretary-General of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), said Africa’s digital economy could generate more than $700bn by 2035, but that depends on removing the regulatory barriers that stop digital businesses operating across borders.

Those barriers are practical – businesses struggle to receive cross-border payments, verify customers in another country or legally transfer data across borders.

According to Ingram, these barriers show up long before customs. “For an online brand, crossing into Botswana, Kenya or Zambia is decided at the checkout,” she says. “The brands that win are the ones that stop treating Africa as a single market and start building for each one.”

Ingram’s insights are shaped by the agency’s own growth. TDMC recently welcomed CA&S Group as a strategic 30% shareholder, with a pathway to majority ownership, a move that pairs CA&S’s physical route-to-market scale with TDMC’s specialist digital commerce capability across Southern and East Africa.

Here Ingram shares five lessons learnt from running e-commerce and media across multiple African markets:

1. Price for the shopper, not the spreadsheet.

Converting rand prices at the day’s exchange rate is not localisation, says Ingram. “Currency swings, local price anchors and what competitors charge on the ground decide whether a basket converts.”

2. The checkout follows the wallet.

Shoppers pay the way they already pay. “If your checkout only offers the payment methods that work in South Africa, you’ve built a store much of the market won’t use,” Ingram explains. Payment preferences differ from country to country, and a checkout that ignores that quietly turns buyers away.

3. Your delivery promise is your brand promise.

In e-commerce, reliability carries more weight than price. “A missed delivery window does more damage than a higher price,” says Ingram. Brands should be upfront about how long delivery really takes, what it really costs, and how returns work before the customer clicks buy. “Honest expectations build more trust than optimistic ones.”

4. Platforms don’t travel evenly.

Features, ad billing and payment integrations that work at home may not be available, or may behave differently, in another market. “Check before you commit budget,” Ingram advises. “A campaign built on assumptions about platform capability can fail on launch day.”

5. Plan around paydays and data costs.

When people get paid, and what it costs them to load your page, shape when and how they shop. As Ingram explains, heavy sites and badly timed campaigns “burn money quietly”. Lightweight pages and campaigns timed to local pay cycles protect both the customer’s data bill and the brand’s media spend.

These insights highlight that the focus for brands wanting to extend into Africa shouldn’t be on advertising creative or audience targeting, instead it should be on pricing, payments, logistics, platform capability and the economics of the customer’s own phone.

“Cross-border growth is an operations problem dressed up as a marketing one,” says Ingram. “Brands that fix the checkout first spend far less getting customers to it.” The brands that benefit will be the ones that do the work market by market, building a pricing model, a checkout, a delivery promise and a media plan that fit each country’s shoppers.