How OneDayOnly engineered payments infrastructure at scale with Stitch

OneDayOnly has been South Africa's original daily deals site since 2010, releasing a rotating range of offers across categories from tech to homeware to luxury goods, each available for only twenty four hours. What started as a single deal a day has grown into a platform offering over 300 deals daily, built on a series of deliberate shifts: a move from a desktop-first to a mobile-first business, and the introduction of properties including Wine Wednesday in 2016, the Lunchtime Deal in 2017, an expanded FMCG offering during 2020, a permanent Everyday Essentials shop in 2021, gift vouchers in 2022 and Extra Time Deals in 2024.

"South Africans are stretched; value gets thrown around a lot in retail without much actually behind it. Online shopping can feel either overwhelming or untrustworthy in 2026," says Jessy van Eden, Brand and Strategic Partnerships Manager at OneDayOnly. "We try to be the place where the discount is real, the products are good, and the experience is fun."

That customer base spans a wide range of geographies, age groups and income brackets, united by a sharp eye for value and, for many, membership in the platform's loyalty base, known as the OneDayOnly Fans. As expectations around fast delivery and seamless checkout have risen across online payments in South Africa, so has the pressure on the infrastructure sitting behind every transaction.

The challenge: complex payment operations bring rising checkout friction 

OneDayOnly's deal model runs on urgency, with each offer live for a fixed 24-hour window. Any friction at checkout, or any payment that fails for the wrong reason, not only costs the business individual sales but erodes customer trust and adds pressure to the client service team.

"Payments are a core part of the customer experience, and it's treated that way," says Kassel Rothmann, Head of Finance and Commercials at OneDayOnly. "Decisions about payment infrastructure get the same scrutiny as decisions about the website, the app, the brand or merchandising, because from our customer's perspective they are all the OneDayOnly experience."

As the platform scaled over the past five years, the complexity of its payment operations grew alongside it, creating several bottlenecks: 

• Daily transaction-to-settlement reconciliations became increasingly cumbersome and time consuming for the finance team. 
• Higher traffic volumes magnified the financial impact of any payment system outage. 
• Checkout friction was resulting in a growing number of abandoned carts. 

Rothmann sums up the challenge: "Ultimately, our rapid growth meant our needs shifted over time, and we needed a holistic payment strategy capable of supporting the business at its new scale."

The solution: reliable and robust payments with Stitch

When evaluating payment providers, OneDayOnly weighed four requirements against each: 

• Security and compliance needed to be uncompromising, with built-in fraud prevention suited to a highly regulated environment
• The platform's high transaction volumes demanded scalability and uptime, with redundancies and automatic failover, so that gateway downtime never cost a transaction
• Conversion depended on a partner offering a frictionless checkout and access to multiple payment methods beyond card
• The commercial model also needed to optimise routing and minimise failed transaction fees to protect margin.

"We ultimately chose Stitch because they offer more than just a commoditised payment gateway," Rothmann explains. "Their technology gave us the reliability and advanced payment methods we needed, but it was their partnership approach that won us over. Their deep understanding of the South African payments landscape, developer-friendly architecture and willingness to collaborate on solving our specific operational bottlenecks made them the ideal strategic partner for our next phase of growth."

Through the onboarding process, members of the Stitch team were paired directly with OneDayOnly's internal developers, providing hands-on support through integration. As with all Stitch client relationships, that collaborative approach continues well beyond go-live. "They don't just wait for us to reach out with issues; they take a proactive role in our payments journey, offering practical advice to help us optimise the checkout experience for our customers," says Rothmann. "It's a very solid, collaborative relationship."

The results: 5%+ lift in payment success rates and faster settlement 

Since switching to Stitch, OneDayOnly has recorded measurable gains across both its checkout experience and its back office operations.

Payment success rates have improved by approximately 5%, meaning more successful transactions, fewer payment-related support tickets and less customer frustration at checkout. Settlement timelines have also accelerated, giving the finance team access to cash on hand sooner than under the platform's previous setup. Reconciliation, once a daily source of operational drag, is now considerably simpler, freeing up manual administrative time that the finance team previously spent verifying transactions.

Looking ahead: what’s next for OneDayOnly

For OneDayOnly, the fundamentals of the business remain unchanged even as it scales. "The fundamentals of what we do, finding incredibly good deals, making them easy to buy and keeping the experience fun, aren't going anywhere," says van Eden. "Over the next few years I'm most excited about deepening our brand voice and making sure that as we scale, we don't lose the personality that's always made ODO feel different from other e-commerce platforms."

That balance between speed and authenticity extends to how the business is approaching new technology internally. "We're actively adapting and encouraging AI across the business," says Kim Calitz, head of marketing at OneDayOnly. "It's already helping us move faster through backlog work as we scale, and each department has taken it up in the way that makes most sense for them. The use cases differ, but the objective is the same: speeding up processes, streamlining workflows and driving efficiency wherever it makes sense."

Calitz is clear that this shift has limits. "Our website and app are our product, so on the customer-facing side, we use AI to help us ship better features sooner and keep pace with how fast the industry is moving. But authenticity matters just as much to us as speed. The human touch is core to how we operate, especially the way our team hustles to negotiate the best possible deals for our customers, and that's something AI hasn't come close to replicating."

As OneDayOnly continues to grow its daily deal volume and loyalty base, Stitch remains focused on giving the platform payments infrastructure that can scale with it, without adding friction to the 24-hour urgency that defines the brand.

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FAQs

What payments challenges do high-growth South African e-commerce platforms face?

As transaction volumes grow, platforms often run into reconciliation delays, higher financial exposure during payment system downtime, and checkout friction that leads to abandoned carts. OneDayOnly experienced all three before restructuring its payments approach with Stitch.

How did OneDayOnly improve its payment success rate?

OneDayOnly worked with Stitch to address reliability, checkout friction and reconciliation complexity. They also were able to access premium 3DS and leverage dynamic 3DS when needed, resulting in a roughly 5% improvement in payment success rates alongside faster settlement and reduced manual admin.

Why did OneDayOnly choose Stitch as a payments partner?

OneDayOnly selected Stitch for its security and compliance standards, high-volume scalability, developer-friendly architecture and collaborative approach to solving specific operational bottlenecks, rather than a standard commoditised gateway relationship.

How is OneDayOnly using AI in its business?

OneDayOnly uses AI internally across departments to speed up backlog work and streamline processes, and on the customer-facing side to ship product features faster. Human judgement remains central to areas such as deal negotiation, which the business considers core to its brand.

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