Stitch Express in 2025: elevating e-commerce performance across South Africa

Two years ago, Stitch launched its first spinout, WigWag, with a vision to engineer a next-generation checkout and payments solution designed specifically for the needs of South Africa’s fast-growing e-commerce and SME ecosystem, while Stitch focused more squarely on serving enterprise businesses. 

Since launching, WigWag evolved from a payment links solution to a streamlined checkout tool, and today into a broader performance engine powering conversion and growth for online retailers across the country.

In 2025, we brought WigWag back under the Stitch brand in a formal rebrand that saw the launch of Stitch Express and a more concise focus on serving the needs of merchants that operate on e-commerce platforms like Shopify and Woo. We’ve continued to accelerate the growth of the brand with our Spring/Summer 2025 feature release, and the launch of Elevate25, our first dedicated summit for the operators shaping modern retail. 

With much more to come in 2026, our focus remains to help e-commerce businesses move faster, convert more customers and build resilient, high-performance payment operations.

A new chapter: WigWag → Stitch Express

At the start of the year, we introduced an evolution in our e-commerce strategy with the move from WigWag to Stitch Express — a purpose-built checkout and payment optimisation solution for e-commerce businesses operating on platforms like Shopify and Woo, built on top of the Stitch payments platform.

South Africa’s online retail sector is expanding rapidly, but many businesses still face unnecessary friction in the conversion journey: slow checkout load times, abandoned carts, poor payment method orchestration and limited insight into where customers are dropping off in the payment process. Stitch Express was created to solve these challenges with precision.

The new brand and product identity allowed us to focus more squarely on solving needs for e-commerce merchants, while leveraging the reliable Stitch infrastructure and known brand more closely. 

What the evolution enabled

• A consolidated product suite designed to help e-commerce businesses minimise friction at checkout, offer the most-demanded payment methods to their customers and drive consistent conversion uplift
• Faster development cycles and deeper integration opportunities with the core Stitch payments infrastructure

Today, Stitch Express is growing quickly and serves some of the hottest brands in South Africa’s e-commerce space. As we evolve, we have plans to roll out even more solutions demanded by businesses in this space in the coming months.

Stitch Express hosts its first summit: Elevate25

On 7 August, Stitch Express convened operators, founders, investors and growth leaders from across South Africa’s e-commerce ecosystem for the inaugural Elevate25 Summit – a one-day experience built to equip merchants with tactical insights, practical tools and high-performance strategies for the next era of online retail.

More than two hundred curated attendees gathered for workshops, masterclasses and deep-dive conversations led by some of the most influential voices in e-commerce, investment and brand strategy.

Featured speakers included:

• Zethu Mthetwa, Business Partnerships Lead, TikTok
• Anwar Jappie, Head of Industry at Google
• Stef Steinmann, Co-founder at Old School
• Anesu Malisa, Head of Gen Z Marketing at Samsung
• Judy Senzul, Head of Consumer Profile, Invenfin (Remgro Group)
• Jandre de Beer, Founder, V8 Capital
• Kevan van der Velde, Co-Founder & Head of Growth, Litehouse Lighting
• David Torr, Founder & CEO, FARO

Key conversations shaping e-commerce in South Africa

Discussions at Elevate25 were curated specifically for leaders building in the online retail space, including: 

• Scaling brands with seamless logistics, featuring experts from The Courier Guy, Litehouse, and Takealot
• Investing in e-com: how to determine whether your e-com business is ready for funding
• Trends in SA's retail landscape from the team at Google

V8 Media’s Jandre de Beer also recorded a series of podcast episodes with some of the speakers during the event. You can watch them all here. 

Introducing the Spring/Summer 2025 launch: Express, redesigned for performance

At the summit, Stitch Express unveiled its Spring/Summer 2025 release – a series of upgrades crafted to optimise conversion at every stage of the customer journey, inspired by the conversations we had with Express customers about what’s most important for them.

The launch reintroduced Express as a refined, more powerful solution built to help e-commerce businesses offer faster checkouts, smoother payment flows and higher completion rates through:

• A redesigned, performance-first checkout interface
• More intelligent routing and orchestration across payment methods
• Enhanced reliability across high-traffic or high-intensity sales events
• New features that reduce friction and improve customer trust, including:
  
  • Branded checkout to maintain trust
  • The Shopify Express app, enabling merchants to rename and reorder payment methods so customers see the methods they want to use, upfront

Specific failure reasons shown to customers in the event a payment is not successful, encouraging retries

A year defined by momentum — and what comes next

From a new identity to an expanded product ecosystem and the launch of our flagship summit, 2025 marked a breakthrough year for Stitch Express. It reinforced our commitment to the operators driving South Africa’s e-commerce sector forward – those building resilient, fast-moving and customer-centred businesses in a market defined by complexity and competition.

Looking ahead, we remain focused on engineering better outcomes for merchants: higher conversion, smarter optimisation, stronger reliability and more seamless commerce experiences from cart to settlement.

What's next for Stitch Express? 

We’ve been listening to Stitch Express merchants, and a few key priorities keep coming through. In Q1 we’ll have a bunch of exciting new launches, including the ability to collect subscription payments, some exciting solutions for in-store transactions and a major update to the way we offer Buy Now Pay Later.

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Stay tuned for a busy Q1!

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