Stitch‘s new report on how South Africans shop in 2026, based on a survey of 3,000 consumers and 27 in-depth qualitative interviews, paints a detailed picture of how South Africans discover, buy and pay for things today, and the findings show that local commerce is changing faster than most businesses realise.
Here are the most important takeaways.
Online shopping is now a weekly habit
The days of online shopping being a niche activity are long gone. More than nine in ten South African online shoppers make at least one digital purchase per month, and nearly one in five shop weekly or more. Three quarters of online shoppers now spend more than R2,000 per month on digital purchases, with almost a quarter spending over R10,000. That’s a material share of household income flowing through digital channels.
Clothing and apparel leads the categories, but the breadth is striking: more than half of online shoppers are buying electronics, health and beauty products and groceries through digital channels. On-demand grocery platforms like Checkers Sixty60, Woolworths Dash and Mr D have transformed food shopping from an occasional convenience into a daily routine.
When South Africans shop: evenings and paydays
Transaction data from the Stitch platform reveals two powerful rhythms that shape the shopping calendar.
The first is weekly. Friday is the highest-volume shopping day, with 37% more transactions than Sunday. But volume doesn’t tell the whole story — Tuesday sees the highest average basket value, while Saturday has high transaction frequency but lower spend per purchase, pointing to impulse buys rather than planned spending.
The second rhythm is monthly, and it tracks the salary cycle closely. The 25th of the month is actually the single busiest shopping day — not the 1st, as many assume — likely because employers pay early ahead of month-end. The 1st and 5th are also high-volume days. On the 1st of the month, the platform processes 80% more transactions than on the quietest day, the 22nd. Basket sizes also shift: average spend on the 24th is 46% higher than on the 8th.
For businesses, the implication is clear: promotional campaigns and product launches timed to these windows will reach consumers when they’re most willing to spend.
The peak transaction hour across the platform is 20:00 SAST. South Africans are shopping from their couches after dinner, not during business hours — which has real implications for checkout infrastructure, fraud monitoring and customer support availability.
Where people shop: brand websites lead, but international platforms are surging
Direct brand websites remain the most popular destination, with 74.6% of consumers shopping there, according to Stitch’s research. Retailer sites (68%) and large marketplaces like Takealot and Amazon SA (62%) follow closely.
The most significant shift is the rise of international low-cost platforms. Temu, Shein and AliExpress have grown from a negligible presence to 48.5% of online shoppers in just two years. Consumers aren’t abandoning local platforms — they’re adding international ones to their repertoire. This represents one of the most significant structural shifts in South African retail in recent memory.
Social commerce — shopping directly through TikTok, Instagram and WhatsApp — sits at 26.9% but is growing quickly as the infrastructure around it matures.
For local merchants, the competitive response isn’t necessarily on price. International platforms typically only accept card payments. The opportunity lies in offering superior local payment methods — Capitec Pay, Apple Pay, Pay by bank — that international platforms cannot easily replicate. Stitch enables merchants to offer all of these through a single integration, giving local businesses a payments advantage that cross-border platforms cannot easily access.
The payments landscape is fragmenting rapidly
There is no longer a single dominant payment method in South Africa, and Stitch’s data captures just how quickly the landscape is shifting. What consumers choose depends on what they’re buying, where and how much it costs.
Debit cards still lead across all categories, but their share is shrinking. The most striking development is the rise of Capitec Pay, which launched in March 2023 and has already reached 24.6% preference for online purchases — making it the second most preferred method across groceries, online and large purchases. Pay by bank has grown steadily from 36% in 2023 to 45% in 2025 and continues upward.
Digital wallets have had an explosive year. One-click wallets — Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay — were adopted by 57.5% of consumers in the past 12 months. When merchants integrated Apple Pay through Stitch, more than 25% of customers chose it immediately, with transaction success rates of nearly 96% compared to 80% for card.
Overall, 93.3% of consumers tried a new payment method in the past year. A checkout that offers only one or two payment options is leaving revenue on the table. Stitch’s platform supports the full range of payment methods South African consumers now expect, from bank-native options to digital wallets and BNPL.
The primary driver of payment choice is convenience (31%), followed closely by security (24%). The checkout experience has to deliver both.
Buy Now Pay Later moves from a financing tool to an everyday method
Among credit-active consumers, 71% now use Buy Now Pay Later at some frequency. Nearly 39% of all consumers tried BNPL for the first time in the past 12 months. The South African BNPL market is expected to reach $1.11 billion in 2026.
Electronics leads BNPL usage at 62%, followed by clothing and fashion (45%), health and beauty (41%), home and furniture (39%), and — notably — groceries at 33%. The presence of groceries in the top five signals that BNPL is normalising for routine, everyday purchases, not just big-ticket items.
Almost half of consumers (48.7%) want BNPL available both online and in-store. Omnichannel BNPL is a clear unmet demand, and first movers will have a meaningful advantage.
The barriers that remain are worth noting. Many consumers associate BNPL with debt, and trust is still a factor. The opportunity for merchants is to offer BNPL clearly, transparently and across channels — framing it as a flexible payment option rather than a credit product.
Trust is built — and lost — at checkout
South Africa’s e-commerce cart abandonment rate reached 84% in 2025. For every 100 shoppers who add something to their cart, only 16 complete the purchase. And 62% of consumers who experience a payment failure don’t return to complete the transaction.
Nearly 1 in 4 online card payment attempts don’t result in a successful transaction. The reasons break down as follows: insufficient funds (37%), invalid card details (27%), exceeds withdrawal limit (15%), bank declined (10%), 3D Secure abandoned (5%), and other errors (6%). Around 30% of card failures are caused by friction that bank-native payment methods eliminate entirely — wrong details, expired cards and 3DS drop-off.
Consumers have developed clear mental models for assessing checkout safety. Two-factor authentication is valued by 59%, biometric authentication by 56%, and 64% have abandoned a purchase specifically because of payment security concerns. Unexpected pop-ups or redirects are seen as fraud signals by 57% of consumers.
The practical takeaway: first-attempt payment success is the single most impactful checkout metric. Embedded, seamless payment flows consistently outperform redirect-heavy checkouts on both trust and conversion.
Cash is declining but not disappearing
Cash usage has fallen 19 percentage points and now accounts for 38% of retail transactions, according to Stitch’s analysis. But it hasn’t disappeared, and it won’t disappear uniformly.
Digital payments dominate for planned purchases, high-value transactions, subscriptions and online shopping. Cash persists where informality, immediacy and privacy matter — small everyday purchases, informal and local merchants, situations with limited digital acceptance, and cases where consumers want to manage their spending without a digital trail.
Importantly, demand for convenience is not limited to higher-income consumers. Lower-income consumers show strong demand for convenience, often developing informal or community-based solutions. This points to a real opportunity for inclusive digital payment solutions that formalise existing behaviours rather than replacing them — an area Stitch sees as a meaningful growth frontier for South African commerce.
Five trends that will define South African commerce
Looking ahead, the research points to five forces that businesses need to prepare for.
The first is the omnichannel imperative. Consumers don’t think in channels — they move fluidly between online research and in-store purchase, or vice versa. Payment methods, pricing and availability need to be consistent across every touchpoint.
The second is the surge in bank-embedded payments. Capitec Pay’s growth from zero to nearly a quarter of online purchases in three years is a signal, not an anomaly. Absa Pay, Nedbank Direct and PayShap are all in market. The card duopoly is being disrupted.
The third is the rise of agentic commerce. Between 31% and 34% of South Africans are already using ChatGPT regularly. AI-referred shoppers convert at nearly 50% higher rates and carry 14% higher average order values than organic search visitors. As AI agents move from research to comparison to transaction, businesses with structured product data and API-first payment infrastructure will be positioned to capture this shift. Those with manual checkout flows and unstructured catalogues will be invisible to it.
The fourth is the international platform challenge. Nearly half of South African online shoppers now use Temu, Shein or AliExpress. Local merchants cannot compete on price at that scale. The differentiator is checkout experience, local payment methods, delivery speed and trust.
The fifth is BNPL’s evolution from checkout tool to everyday payment method. The inclusion of groceries in the top BNPL categories, combined with the first Variable Recurring Payments implementation in South Africa, signals the direction: flexible, bank-native, frictionless payment flows designed for high-frequency, variable-amount transactions.
What this means for businesses
The South African consumer is shopping more frequently, across more platforms and with more payment methods than at any point in the country’s digital history. Stitch’s research makes several implications clear.
Businesses that treat their online presence as secondary to their physical stores are misreading the market — 62.5% of consumers now shop online as much or more than in-store.
Offering a single payment method at checkout is no longer viable. 93.3% of consumers tried something new this year. The checkout experience needs to reflect the diversity of how people actually want to pay — and Stitch’s platform data confirms that merchants who offer multiple methods, including bank-native options and digital wallets, convert at meaningfully higher rates.
Security and trust aren’t just about encryption. They’re about perception. Familiar interfaces, seamless flows and visible security signals matter as much as the underlying infrastructure.
And for forward-looking businesses, the time to invest in AI-readiness — structured product data, API-first checkout, machine-readable catalogues — is now, not when the wave has already broken. Stitch is building toward exactly this: payment infrastructure designed for programmatic flows, not just human-driven checkout.
