Companies Using Affirm

I spent two years researching the technographic data space before we built this crawler, and one thing that research kept surfacing is that category rankings mislead you when the category is concentrated. Affirm is a good example. It ranks second in buy now, pay later. It is also about one eighth the size of the leader. Both facts are true and only one of them is useful.

What second place actually means here

We detect Affirm on 9,523 live domains, which is 8.17% of the BNPL market we track. Afterpay sits at 68.33%. So the gap between first and second is far wider than the gap between second and fifth, where Sezzle (7.45%), HeyLight (2.63%) and Scalapay (2.39%) are packed together.

If you read that as Affirm losing, you would be reading it wrong. The two products do not chase the same merchant, and the industry data is where that becomes obvious.

The big-ticket signature

Retail leads Affirm's merchant mix at 15.51%, which is unremarkable. Everything after that is not. Retail Luxury Goods and Jewelry at 6.74%. Motor Vehicle Manufacturing at 5.5%. Furniture and Home Furnishings Manufacturing at 3.64%. Sporting Goods at 3.07%. Computers and Electronics at 1.89%. Automotive at 1.78%.

Compare that with Afterpay, where the second tier is Restaurants (4.44%), Food and Beverage Services (4.04%) and Wellness and Fitness Services (3.41%). One provider's merchants sell dinner and gym memberships. The other's sell recreational vehicles and furniture. The named merchants confirm it: Camping World, YETI, SharkNinja, World Market, PacSun.

Affirm and Afterpay are not really competitors. One provider's merchants sell restaurant meals; the other's sell recreational vehicles.

That difference follows directly from the product. A six-week, four-payment split works on a $120 order. It does not work on a $6,000 caravan. Affirm's longer financed terms, with shopper APR that can run to 36%, exist for exactly the orders Afterpay's structure cannot carry.

Merchants are bigger, and the data proves itself

Affirm's size distribution runs upmarket of the category. 58.07% of its merchants employ 1 to 10 people against Afterpay's 76.47%, and 28.93% employ 11 to 50. The 1,001 to 5,000 band holds 1.24%, over three times Afterpay's 0.37%.

There is a nice internal check on this. Our LinkedIn enrichment rate for Affirm is 45.9%, the highest of the three major providers, against 42.8% for Afterpay and 32.4% for Sezzle. Enrichment rate is essentially a proxy for how established a business is, because tiny owner-operated shops often have no company profile to match. The size distribution and the match rate tell the same story independently, which is the kind of agreement that makes me trust a finding.

A one-country product

The geography is the most concentrated in the category. The United States is 88.49% of Affirm's enriched merchants and Canada is 7.98%. Nothing else reaches 1%. Afterpay, for contrast, holds 51.26% US, 20.07% Australia, 9.16% United Kingdom.

For anyone using this data to build a target list, that is the practical constraint. An Affirm-detection list is a North American list, full stop. If your addressable market includes ANZ or Europe, Affirm detections will not find it.

Where merchants go

Our crawler has watched Affirm's churn directly since 16 March 2026. In that window Affirm lost 86 merchants to Afterpay and won 52 back, and lost 29 to Sezzle while gaining 11. Its clearest win was ResolvePay, which sent 40 merchants across.

Net negative against both main rivals, then, though on small absolute numbers against a 9,523 base. My read is that the merchants moving from Affirm to Afterpay are ones whose average order value never justified financing, and who found a ~6% plus $0.30 fee hard to defend on a small basket. That is a positioning correction rather than a competitive loss.

Affirm's enrichment rate of 45.9% is the highest in the category, and it corroborates the size data: its merchants are established businesses, not hobby stores.

Stack and reading the chart

Shopify appears on 63.05% of Affirm storefronts and WooCommerce on 21.93%, a notably higher WooCommerce share than Afterpay's base shows. Klaviyo on 31.00% is worth attention: Affirm merchants run dedicated ecommerce marketing tooling at about half again the rate of Afterpay's merchants, which fits the picture of larger, more deliberate operations.

On the usage chart, treat July 2025 to June 2026 as a seam rather than a trend. Everything before it comes from our long-run detection history, everything after from our own live crawl, and the coverage differs. The like-for-like segment is June 2026 onward, where Affirm went from 7,794 to 9,523 domains. That is real growth, measured consistently, and it is the only part of the series I would quote.

What I would do with this data

An Affirm detection tells you three things at once that most technographic signals cannot. The merchant is North American, at roughly 96% probability across the US and Canada. The merchant sells something expensive enough to need financing, which rules out most of the impulse-purchase long tail. And the merchant is more likely than a typical BNPL user to be an established business, which the 45.9% enrichment rate and the 28.93% share in the 11 to 50 employee band both support.

That combination is worth more than the raw count of 9,523 suggests. A list of Afterpay merchants is eight times larger and considerably more diluted. If whatever you sell has a price floor, the smaller list will convert better.

The honest limitation is coverage. We enrich 4,374 of 9,523 Affirm domains, so every percentage in the sections above describes that matched subset rather than the full merchant base. The unmatched domains skew small, which means the genuine share of micro-merchants is probably a little above the 58.07% we can measure. I would rather say that plainly than present an enriched sample as though it were a census.

One last note on the category itself. BNPL detection is a checkout-widget signal, so it tells you what a store offers today, not what it has contracted for. A merchant can sign with a provider months before the script goes live, and can leave it in place after moving spend elsewhere. That lag is worth remembering whenever a switching number looks smaller than the market noise around it suggests.