Since Black Friday-Cyber Monday started in South Africa in 2012, retailers and shoppers have seen a remarkable change in payment solutions and platforms.
Over the past 12 years, payment methods have evolved to include virtual cards, QR codes, digital wallets and mobile banking applications.
PayShap, Google Pay, Apple Pay, buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) and bank-app checkout payments, like Capitec Pay, have become synonymous with quick and easy one-tap shopping.
And in 2026, the big question isn’t where people are going to shop, but how these changes in the way South Africans pay define the four busiest retail days of the year.
Retailers are expected to support this growing range of payment options. The 2026 Online Retail in South Africa report found that digital wallet payments grew by more than 35% year-on-year, while 54.7% of surveyed online retailers offered BNPL, up from 15.9%.
PayShap, meanwhile, passed one billion cumulative transactions in June 2026, with monthly volumes exceeding 60 million.
The challenge for Black Friday-Cyber Monday is not simply having the ability to offer more ways to pay, but to ensure all these choices work reliably during peak demand.
Online, failed payments carry a cost – the 2026 Online Retail in SA report found that 61.2% of retailers named declined cards as the leading source of abandoned carts.
And what about how these payment choices will change the behaviour of the shopper? One who can split a payment may fill a bigger basket, or pay for the same basket in a different way. One who can tap their phone may move through a queue faster.
Loyalty programmes add another variable as retailers use them to bring Black Friday-Cyber Monday buyers back once the discounts end.
In the Ecentric 2025 Black Friday Index, precision pricing, bundling and loyalty programmes were found to be the most likely strategies to pay off in 2026. This year’s trading will show whether the new payment methods amplify those strategies, or sit alongside them.
The second change is the counter. The queue has become, thanks to Android devices that can run payment applications on hardware that’s capable of also handling other retail functions, less rigid and more dynamic.
Staff can carry them to the queue and accept payments from anywhere in the store, which means the customer can pay wherever they stand. Imagine being able to place point-of-sale at a section that sells high-value, or in-demand goods so shoppers can buy and leave at speed.
The question for 2026 is going to be how retailers approach the sale point and how they will embed this flexibility into store and queue dynamics when the crowds and the demand are high.
The third change is how retailers plan for failure. Peak volumes place immense strain on store networks, and a store that loses its connection on Black Friday morning loses more than a few minutes of trade. Queues stall, staff improvise and shoppers leave.
Fallback solutions that keep devices taking payment when the store’s WiFi or communications go down are designed to turn an outage into a brief delay.
Online, failed payments carry a cost – the 2026 Online Retail in South Africa report found that 61.2% of retailers named declined cards as the leading source of abandoned carts. This Black Friday, retailers need to build resilience into their payment systems.
These changes also arrive with a cautious consumer. Shoppers in 2025 planned their purchases carefully and waited patiently for the deals they wanted. When purchases are planned, the way a shopper pays is often part of the process, and a retailer that cannot offer the preferred method risks losing the sale to one that can. As Black Friday-Cyber Monday approaches, this is the time to ask practical questions.
Can every till accept the ways customers want to pay? Can staff take payment anywhere in the store? What happens if the connection drops?
Black Friday-Cyber Monday 2026 will produce the first real evidence of how new payment methods, devices and fallback solutions perform at peak volumes, and the data from these four days should indicate which changes made a measurable difference to how South Africans shop and which retailers were ready for them.
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