Commerce insights and trends to take into 2026

The rapid rise in e-commerce, shifting consumer behaviour, infrastructure pressure, logistics constraints and rapid technological progress have reshaped how businesses sell, collect and deliver at scale. For enterprises, the question is no longer whether commerce will change, but how to build systems that can perform reliably through constant disruption.

Based on insights from our research, events and industry analyses throughout 2025, several clear themes emerge. We’ve compiled them here with a focus on what executives should prioritise as they plan for 2026.

Omnichannel is now table stakes, necessitating a more unified commerce experience

While much of the industry still talks about online and in-person commerce as two distinct channels, the reality is that the two continue to converge. Customers increasingly expect continuity across discovery, payment, fulfilment and support, regardless of where the transaction originates.

At Scale Summit 2025, our discussion on in-person and omnichannel commerce revealed a key tension for enterprises: while most payments still happen in person, digital infrastructure increasingly determines how seamless those experiences feel. Tokenisation, stored credentials and pre-authorised payment models are reducing friction across physical and digital touchpoints alike.

At the same time, methods such as cash-on-delivery continue to play a role in South Africa, particularly where access and trust remain uneven. The enterprises that perform best are those that accommodate local realities while continuing to build for a lower-friction future.

Insight to take into 2026:
Design commerce journeys as continuous experiences. Channel boundaries matter far less to customers than consistency and ease.

Checkout performance remains a decisive lever

Checkout remains one of the highest-impact points in the commerce journey. Based on our 2025 State of Consumer Payments report, and the following webinar discussion with our team, we know that even marginal improvements in speed, reliability and clarity can deliver outsized gains at enterprise scale.

Modern checkout performance is driven by factors that are often invisible to customers: intelligent routing, uptime under load, local payment method optimisation and failure recovery. These capabilities require infrastructure-level thinking, not just interface design.

As competition intensifies and acquisition costs rise, enterprises that treat checkout as strategic infrastructure rather than a front-end feature will be better positioned to defend and grow margin.

Insight to take into 2026:
Checkout is infrastructure. Performance gains compound at scale and justify sustained investment in this aspect of the customer journey. Partnering with a payment provider who can streamline this process is a major strategic consideration.

AI is reshaping payments and operations, quietly

Artificial intelligence is already influencing payments, but rarely in headline-grabbing ways. Instead, its impact is felt in backend areas such as fraud detection, reconciliation automation, demand forecasting and exception handling.

According to our leadership team in their thinkpiece on the subject, the most effective applications are those that reduce operational drag rather than replace human decision-making outright. Automating repetitive, error-prone tasks allows teams to focus on judgement, oversight and optimisation.

Stitch Co-Founder and President, Junaid Dadan, adds his prediction for 2026:

“AI for coding is now real. It has reached a point where it's going to significantly impact product and engineering this year. Companies that don't adapt will become uncompetitive.” 

For executives, the implication is clear: AI should be evaluated through the lens of operational leverage and resilience rather than novelty. The goal is not to remove people from the process, but to enable them to operate at higher productivity.

Insight to take into 2026:
Use AI to strengthen control and efficiency, rather than searching for groundbreaking applications. The biggest gains come from improving the systems behind the scenes and empowering people to do their best work where it matters most.

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Resilience is a core commercial capability

At the 2025 Scale Summit, we hosted a panel on building resilient financial infrastructure for modern commerce in South Africa. The conclusion was clear: financial resilience has moved beyond contingency planning and is now a defining characteristic of high-performing commerce systems. 

Enterprises that continue to treat financial infrastructure as a background function risk exposing their operations to avoidable failure. Modern commerce depends on systems that can absorb stress without interrupting money movement. This includes payments routing, settlement, reconciliation and exception handling.

From an executive perspective, resilience requires intentional design choices. Delegating complexity to specialist partners, reducing unnecessary dependencies and maintaining real-time visibility into cash flows are not operational nice-to-haves: They are board-level concerns tied directly to revenue continuity and customer trust.

Insight to take into 2026:
Build for constant disruption, not rare events. Financial and payments infrastructure should be designed to operate reliably under imperfect and ever-changing conditions.

Customer experience extends far beyond checkout

Customer experience is increasingly shaped by what happens after payment. In particular for retail merchants, last-mile delivery, predictability and returns now play a central role in whether customers return, recommend or abandon a brand altogether.

At Scale Summit 2025, our discussion on last-mile logistics yielded valuable insights from logistics and delivery leaders across South Africa, such as The Courier Guy, PAXI and Zulzi. The key takeaway was that speed alone is no longer the dominant metric. Predictability, transparency and control matter more. Consumers are willing to trade immediacy for reliability, provided expectations are clearly set and consistently met.

For enterprises, this shifts the focus from single-metric optimisation to portfolio thinking. Offering a ladder of delivery options, investing in reverse logistics and designing systems that reduce first-attempt delivery failures are all becoming competitive differentiators.

Insight to take into 2026:
Treat logistics and delivery as an essential part of the customer experience strategy, not a downstream operational function.

Consumers want control, not complexity

South African consumers are becoming more deliberate in how they pay. Research from our 2025 report on The State of Consumer Payments in South Africa shows growing preference for payment methods that offer transparency, security and control over timing and value.

This shift is especially clear for online commerce, where consumers expect to manage subscriptions, approve variable charges and choose when and how funds move. Convenience still matters, but it is increasingly defined by clarity and trust rather than speed alone.

For enterprises, this means rethinking how payment choice is presented. Adding more methods does not automatically improve conversion. In many cases, it introduces friction. Merchants who curate payment options carefully, matching methods to customer intent rather than maximising surface area, are more likely to retain customers and see less cart abandonment. 

Insight to take into 2026:
Customer control in checkout is the next phase of convenience. Simplify choice and prioritise transparency over volume.

What this means for enterprise leaders

Commerce performance in 2026 will be determined less by individual features and more by system design. Payments, logistics, checkout and customer experience are converging into a single operational system that must be resilient, flexible and precisely engineered.

Enterprises that succeed will be those that invest early in infrastructure, partner deliberately and design for the realities of the South African market rather than idealised global models.

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Frequently asked questions

What are the biggest commerce trends shaping 2026 in South Africa?

Key trends include a focus on resilient financial infrastructure, logistics reliability, omnichannel convergence, greater consumer control over payments and increased use of AI to improve operational efficiency.

Why is resilience so important for enterprise commerce?

South African commerce operates under constant disruption. Resilient systems help enterprises maintain revenue continuity, protect customer trust and adapt quickly to operational or macroeconomic shocks.

How should enterprises think about payment choice?

More payment methods do not always improve conversion. Enterprises should curate payment options carefully, prioritising clarity, reliability and customer control over sheer variety.

What role will AI play in payments and commerce?

AI is most impactful when applied to fraud detection, reconciliation, forecasting and exception handling. These use cases improve efficiency and control rather than replacing human decision-making.

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