PayFast still owns South African checkout — but Yoco is winning the new stores
We can see the payment stack of 17,378 South African storefronts. PayFast leads by more than two to one, yet among stores launched since 2025 the gap narrows sharply. Here is the whole table.
Every online store makes one decision that is almost impossible to reverse cheaply: who processes the money. We can read that decision off the checkout of 17,378 South African storefronts, so rather than guess at market share, here it is.
The table nobody publishes
Share of South African stores offering each method. Stores commonly offer several, so these do not sum to 100%.
| Provider | Stores | Share |
|---|---|---|
| PayFast | 7,965 | 45.8% |
| Yoco | 3,751 | 21.6% |
| PayPal | 2,530 | 14.6% |
| Payflex | 2,111 | 12.1% |
| Bank deposit | 1,896 | 10.9% |
| Bank transfer | 1,668 | 9.6% |
| Stitch | 1,258 | 7.2% |
| Paystack | 1,043 | 6.0% |
| PayJustNow | 986 | 5.7% |
| Peach Payments | 852 | 4.9% |
| Cash on delivery | 538 | 3.1% |
| Zapper | 523 | 3.0% |
| Capitec Pay | 519 | 3.0% |
| Ozow | 475 | 2.7% |
The interesting number is the one that moves
Across every store we can see, for every ten on PayFast, about 4.7 are on Yoco.
Among stores that launched since the start of 2025, that figure is 7.6.
Yoco is not beating PayFast. It is closing hard on the stores being built right now, which is the cohort that matters if you are projecting where this market sits in three years. Incumbency in payments is sticky — merchants rarely re-platform their checkout for fun — so share among new launches is the leading indicator, and share among all stores is the lagging one.
A footnote that complicates the rivalry: 659 stores run both. Not everyone is choosing.
Two things that surprised us
Buy-now-pay-later is already mainstream. Counting distinct stores rather than adding up providers, 2,742 storefronts — 15.8% — offer at least one BNPL option. Payflex leads, PayJustNow follows. Roughly one South African store in six now lets customers pay in instalments. That is not a pilot; that is a norm.
Nearly a quarter still take manual bank transfer. 3,890 stores — 22.4% — accept EFT, a bank deposit, or both. Add cash on delivery at 3.1% and a meaningful slice of South African eCommerce still settles outside the card rails entirely. Any analysis that models this market purely as card-versus-wallet is missing a fifth of it.
What to do with this
If you are a merchant: PayFast remains the default, and defaults exist for reasons. But check Yoco's pricing against your volume — a lot of recent launches evidently have, and the two are not far apart on fees at lower volumes.
If you are a payment provider: your competitor's share of existing stores tells you about the past. Their share of stores launched in the last nine months tells you about next year. Those two numbers differ by a factor of 1.6 here.
If you are an agency: supporting both PayFast and Yoco is no longer optional, and 659 of your peers' clients already run both.
Counted from Terrain's index on 1 October 2026: 17,378 published South African storefronts where we could read the checkout. Provider names are folded case-insensitively and split on multi-provider listings, so a store offering PayFast and Payflex counts once for each. Share is of stores where payment data is known, not of all South African stores.