Companies Using Afterpay

I've spent the last five years pulling technology adoption data into prospect lists, and Afterpay is one of the cleanest examples I've worked with of a category where the leader and the typical customer look nothing alike. The brand names on this page are department-store fashion. The merchant base underneath is a very long tail of tiny independent shops.

The shape of the merchant base

We detect Afterpay on 79,610 live domains. Of those we matched 34,053 to company records, a 42.8% enrichment rate, and within that matched set 76.47% employ ten people or fewer. Another 17.43% employ 11 to 50. That puts about 94% of Afterpay's merchants under 50 staff. Companies above 10,000 employees account for 0.09%.

That distribution matters if you sell to these merchants. A prospect list built off Afterpay detection is not an enterprise list. It is a list of owner-operated retail, and the tooling those businesses buy, the deal sizes they support and the people who make the decision are all different from what the Old Navy logo implies.

Afterpay's recognisable customers are outliers inside its own merchant base. Fewer than one merchant in a thousand employs more than 10,000 people.

Australia never left

The geographic split is the number I keep coming back to. The United States is the largest market at 51.26% of enriched merchants, which is expected. Australia sitting at 20.07% is not. Afterpay launched in Australia in 2014 and its US expansion has since dominated the story, yet a fifth of the merchant base is still Australian, and New Zealand adds another 3.28%.

Compare that to Affirm, where the United States is 88.49% and no other country clears 8%. Afterpay is the only BNPL provider in our index with a genuinely multi-country merchant base, and the United Kingdom position (9.16%, trading as Clearpay) reinforces it. For anyone doing territory planning off this data, Afterpay is the provider where an ANZ segment is worth building separately.

What merchants sell

Retail leads at 18.49%, and folding in Retail Apparel and Fashion (7.21%) plus Retail Luxury Goods and Jewelry (1.64%) takes explicit retail past 27%. The interesting part is the second cluster: Restaurants at 4.44%, Food and Beverage Services at 4.04%, Wellness and Fitness Services at 3.41% and Personal Care Product Manufacturing at 2.51%.

Those are low-ticket, high-frequency categories. They tell you Afterpay's four-instalment split has been adopted well below the price points where instalment financing traditionally made sense. Affirm's merchant mix, by contrast, carries Motor Vehicle Manufacturing at 5.5% and Furniture at 3.64%, which is what a longer-term financing product attracts. Same category, two genuinely different businesses.

The multi-homing question

Before running this analysis I assumed BNPL stacked the way card wallets do, with merchants offering three or four providers at checkout. Our co-occurrence data says otherwise. Only 0.98% of Afterpay merchants also run Sezzle, and 0.52% also run Affirm. Against that, 38.64% run Apple Pay and 37.35% run PayPal alongside it.

So wallets stack and BNPL does not. Merchants pick one instalment provider and stay with it. That reframes the migration table on this page: when we record 86 merchants moving from Affirm to Afterpay, those are replacements, not additions.

Wallets stack, BNPL doesn't. Under 1% of Afterpay merchants run a second instalment provider, against 38.64% who also offer Apple Pay.

Switching, and what it's worth

Our crawler has been watching Afterpay's churn directly since 16 March 2026, which is about five months. In that window Afterpay gained 86 merchants from Affirm and lost 52 to it, gained 44 from Sezzle and lost 33, and picked up 39 from ResolvePay. Net positive on every line, but the absolute numbers are tiny against a base of 79,610.

I'd treat these as directional only. Five months is a short window, and 10,103 domains have dropped Afterpay entirely in that period without our seeing a replacement provider, which is a much larger flow than any of the competitive switches. Some of that is stores closing, some is merchants removing BNPL on cost grounds at roughly 4% to 6% plus $0.30 per transaction.

The platform tell

Co-occurrence data is usually where I find the sales angle, and Afterpay's is unusually split. Shopify appears on 43.75% of Afterpay storefronts, which is no surprise. Square Online at 37.12% is. That is a much higher Square share than we see under Affirm or Sezzle, and Square Online skews to physical businesses that added ecommerce later: cafes, salons, studios, small food producers.

Put that next to the industry mix, where Restaurants and Wellness and Fitness Services together account for close to 8% of merchants, and a second Afterpay population comes into view. It isn't only online fashion. A meaningful slice is bricks-and-mortar service businesses that took instalments online through Square. Sezzle, by comparison, sits at 93.09% Shopify, which makes it a pure Shopify-ecosystem play and a much narrower one.

Klaviyo on 21.39% is the other useful signal. Roughly one Afterpay merchant in five runs a dedicated ecommerce marketing platform, which is a reasonable proxy for the segment that has moved past a basic store setup. If you're prioritising a list, that intersection is where the budget is.

Reading the growth chart honestly

The usage chart on this page splices two measurement systems. Everything to July 2025 comes from our long-run detection history; everything from June 2026 comes from our own live crawl. The step from 30,803 to 67,447 across that gap is a coverage change, not adoption. Within the live crawl segment, which is like for like, Afterpay went from 67,447 in June 2026 to 79,610 in August 2026.

One more caveat on our own figures. We enrich 42.8% of Afterpay domains with company records, so every percentage in the distribution sections describes the matched 34,053, not all 79,610. The unmatched merchants are disproportionately tiny stores without a LinkedIn page, which means the true small-business concentration is probably higher than the 76.47% we can measure, not lower.

If you want one number from this page, take 79,610 storefronts at 68.33% category share. If you want the useful one, take 76.47% under ten employees. The first tells you Afterpay won the category. The second tells you who actually installed it, and those two facts point at completely different go-to-market motions.