Companies Using American Express

With 10+ years in web crawling and technographic data analysis, I've dug into American Express's merchant adoption using our 228,946 enriched company dataset (29.4% match rate against 780,117 active domains), as of our March 2026 crawl at TechnologyChecker.io. Amex reported $1.55 trillion in cardmember spending in 2024, up 6% from 2023 (per Payments Dive, January 2025). Revenue hit a record $65.95 billion. Here's what our data adds to that picture.

1. Growth trajectory

We first detected Amex acceptance badges on 834 domains in May 2013. For six years, not much happened — by January 2020, we were at 21,000 domains. Then COVID changed the math. Merchants who'd resisted Amex's higher fees suddenly needed every checkout option they could get. Detections hit 235,000 by December 2021. That's 11x in two years.

By April 2025, we peaked at 733,668 active domains. The number has pulled back since — 585,000 by July 2025 — but the overall trajectory matches Amex's own reported 5x growth in merchant locations since 2017 (per Amex newsroom, September 2025). Bloomberg confirmed a 16% increase in global merchant acceptance in the 12 months through June 2025.

"COVID didn't just accelerate ecommerce. For more context, see our Shopify analytics and market trends. It broke the 'we don't take Amex' habit. Merchants who'd held out for years added every payment badge overnight. Our detection data went from 21K to 733K in five years." — Mehmet Suleyman, CEO at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales Signal: The growth curve has bent. Monthly gains slowed in mid-2025. But 99% of US credit-card-accepting merchants now take Amex (per CNBC, citing the Nilson Report). That's the pitch: acceptance is the norm, not a competitive advantage.

2. Who accepts Amex

80.9% of Amex-accepting companies in our data have 1-10 employees. Another 12.0% have 11-50. So 92.9% of Amex merchants are small businesses. The age data lines up: 42.08% were founded in the 2010s, 25.53% in the 2020s. Two-thirds of Amex merchants didn't exist before 2010. They grew up with multi-payment checkout as a default.

The other end of the spectrum: Amazon, Starbucks, Marriott, Bank of America, Siemens. These aren't departmental side projects — aboutamazon.com and starbucks.com are top-level corporate domains. Amex's Shop Small program, which reported 95% of small business owners crediting community support for keeping them going (2025 Amex Impact Study), reinforces the micro-business lean in our data. Millennials and Gen Z accounted for 60% of new Amex card acquisitions in 2023 (per Amex proxy statement), which means the cardholder base skews younger than people assume.

Sales Signal: Payment-adjacent services (POS systems, invoicing, bookkeeping tools) should target the 1-10 employee segment — that's 80.9% of the addressable market. These merchants don't want complexity. They want one-click Amex setup through their existing processor.

3. Industry and geography

Retail at 15.36%. Fashion at 6.64%. Food & Beverage at 2.70%. But here's what matters: the top 10 industries together account for less than 40%. The distribution is flat. Amex is a card network, not a niche tool, and the industry data proves it.

Geography tells a clearer story. The US holds 42.8% of all Amex merchant detections. UK is at 9.7%, Brazil at 6.2%. Per PaymentsJournal (September 2025), the average annual spend on Amex cards issued outside the US is roughly 4x higher than competing cards. Inside the US, it's about 3x. That spending premium explains why Amex has been pushing international acceptance hard — and Brazil's #3 ranking shows it's working. English-speaking markets (US, UK, Australia, Canada) still hold 61.8% of the merchant base.

Sales Signal: English-speaking markets are saturated. Non-English markets — Brazil, Germany (3.0%), France (2.6%), Italy (1.8%) — are under-penetrated relative to GDP and cardholder spending. That's the growth play for payment enablers and localization services.

4. Migration patterns

The biggest inbound flow: PayPal at 47,015 domains. Merchants that previously showed PayPal now display Amex badges. Against Stripe, Amex has a 2.3:1 gain ratio — 13,578 gained versus 5,972 lost. Merchants aren't choosing between Amex and Stripe. They're stacking both.

Card network migration is a different story. Amex lost a net 12,370 domains to Visa and 6,418 to Mastercard. I think this is badge consolidation, not real churn. When a merchant moves to Stripe or Square for processing, individual card network badges often disappear from the page — the gateway handles acceptance without displaying each logo separately.

"Merchants aren't dropping Amex — they're consolidating how they show payment acceptance. When you move to Stripe, your Amex badge disappears even though Stripe still processes Amex transactions underneath." — Mehmet Suleyman, CEO at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales Signal: The PayPal-to-Amex corridor (47K domains) identifies merchants actively diversifying payment options. The Visa/Mastercard losses aren't churn — they're a display problem. Amex acceptance consultants can help merchants maintain visible card network badges even when using gateway processors.

5. What else Amex merchants run

Klaviyo at 32.67% — almost one in three Amex merchants. That's wild. HubSpot (3.10%) and Omnisend (2.98%) are distant seconds. The Klaviyo dominance is a Shopify signal: Shopify POS shows up at 15.71%, and Klaviyo is Shopify's default email integration.

Analytics: Microsoft Clarity (12.16%) and Hotjar (10.31%). These are behavior analytics tools — session recordings, heatmaps, funnel analysis. Merchants care about checkout UX, which makes sense when you're displaying multiple payment badges. CMS is scattered: Duda at 2.63%, Weebly at 1.70%, Wix at 1.43%. No single CMS dominates. Amex merchants build their sites on everything.

Sales Signal: The archetype: DTC ecommerce brands on Shopify + Klaviyo + Amex. If you're selling to that segment, you know their stack before you pick up the phone. The CMS fragmentation (nothing above 2.63%) means site-building services have no dominant competitor in this market.

6. Key takeaways

1. 35x detection growth in five years (21K in 2020 → 733K in April 2025). COVID was the trigger; OptBlue's lower fees kept it going.
2. 80.9% micro-businesses with 1-10 employees. Two-thirds founded after 2010.
3. $1.55 trillion in cardmember spending in 2024 and record $65.95B revenue (per Amex earnings, via Payments Dive).
4. US holds 42.8%; Brazil at #3 (6.2%) is Amex's international growth story.
5. Shopify POS at 15.71% and Klaviyo at 32.67% define the typical Amex merchant stack.
6. Net losses to Visa and Mastercard are badge consolidation, not real churn.

7. Sales applications

Outreach template: "Hi [Name], I noticed your [industry] business accepts Visa and Mastercard but doesn't show American Express. Our data shows [X%] of [industry] companies now accept Amex. Amex cardholders spend about 3x what non-Amex holders spend (per PaymentsJournal, 2025). Want to explore adding Amex through your existing processor?"

Targeting strategy: On TechnologyChecker.io, filter for companies using Stripe or PayPal (high Amex migration corridors) in Retail, Fashion, or Food & Beverage. Focus on 1-10 employee businesses in the US, UK, or Australia.

Competitive angle: Amex's OptBlue program charges an average of 2.33% per transaction (per Verisave/Helcim rate data) — closer to Visa/MC than most merchants realize. And 88% of Amex cardholders prefer to shop where their card is accepted (Amex 2023 survey).

Explore the full list of companies using American Express and filter by industry, country, size, and technology stack across 228,946 enriched companies and 780,117 total detected domains at TechnologyChecker.io.