Before you can lawfully export commercially, you need to be registered with SARS Customs and hold a customs client number. It is a prerequisite, not a formality, and freight forwarders will ask for it before they will move anything.
The registration
Application is to SARS, and it asks for the company's registration and tax details, banking details, and information about what you intend to export. Get your tax affairs in order first — an application from a business that is not tax compliant does not proceed.
Allow time. This is not something to begin when a buyer is waiting.
Tariff codes matter more than they look
Every product is classified under a tariff heading, and that classification determines duties, the documentation required, and whether any preferential trade arrangement applies at the destination.
Get it right at the outset. A misclassification produces delays, unexpected duty, and occasionally penalties — and it is corrected far more easily before the first consignment than after several.
Where the product is not obvious, a clearing agent or a customs specialist will classify it for you, and the fee is small against the cost of getting it wrong repeatedly.
Use a clearing agent to start
Customs documentation is detailed and the consequences of errors fall on the exporter. For a business doing its first consignments, a clearing agent is worth what they charge — they know the destination's requirements, they prepare the declarations, and they resolve the problems.
Learn from them as you go. Many businesses bring routine work in-house later, once the pattern is familiar, and keep the agent for anything unusual.
Check the destination's requirements
Your registration lets you send. Whether the goods may be received is the destination's question, and it varies: import permits, product standards, labelling in a specific language, health or phytosanitary certificates for anything agricultural or food-related.
Confirm this before producing anything, not before shipping it. A consignment refused at the far end is expensive in every direction.
Exchange control and getting paid
Export proceeds are subject to exchange control requirements, and there are obligations about receiving payment into the country within a period. Your bank's trade finance desk deals with this routinely and will explain what applies to you.
Speak to them early — they are also the people who will help with the mechanics of getting paid, which is its own subject.
Keep the documents
Declarations, invoices, transport documents, certificates of origin, proof of export. There are retention requirements, and these documents are what evidence a zero-rated supply for VAT purposes.
An export you cannot document may be treated as a local sale, with VAT payable out of your margin.
General guidance, not customs, tax or legal advice. Requirements and procedures change; confirm with SARS, your bank and a licensed clearing agent.