How Stitch engineered payments infrastructure at scale for OneDayOnly

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. 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.”

— Kassel Rothmann (Head of Finance and Commercials, OneDayOnly)

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.”

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.”

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.

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.