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 178,842 enriched company dataset (29.4% match rate against 823,048 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

77.87% 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: 43.17% were founded in the 2010s, 30.07% 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 77.87% 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 18.48%. Fashion at 9.89%. 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.

Why there is no migration section on this page

An earlier version of this analysis reported 13,578 domains gained against 5,972 lost, a 2.3:1 ratio. Those numbers were withdrawn. American Express is detected by a single clause — [aria-labelledby='pi-american_express'] — one of the accepted-card logos Shopify renders in the storefront footer, and 99.8% of the domains counted here run Shopify, the highest share of any technology in this category. The same footer block simultaneously registers Visa, Mastercard, Apple Pay, Google Pay and several others, so movement between them tracks theme and payment-settings changes rather than merchant behaviour.

Sales Signal: This page measures logo display, not card acceptance agreements. Use it to size the Shopify storefront population, nothing more.

5. What else Amex merchants run

The co-occurrence table is the strongest single piece of evidence about what this page measures, and it is worth reading in two halves.

The top half is one block of markup. Visa appears on 99.86% of Amex domains and Mastercard on 99.83%, with Apple Pay at 91.61%, Google Pay at 85.57% and Shop Pay at 84.36%. With Shopify on 99.84% — the highest single-platform concentration in our corpus, those percentages are not six independent purchasing decisions — they are the accepted-payment icon row rendered on one platform's storefronts. Six brands at ninety-plus percent of one another is arithmetically impossible in a market where merchants choose.

The bottom half is the real merchant stack, and it does vary: Google Analytics 49.47%, Google Tag Manager 47.93%, Facebook Pixel 47.14%, TikTok Pixel 11.88%, Judge.me Reviews 22.02%, Klaviyo 19.95%, Klarna Checkout 20.22%, Microsoft Clarity 7.51%. That is the profile of a small direct-to-consumer Shopify merchant running paid social, email and on-site reviews — which is a genuinely useful description of this population, and the part of the table worth prospecting against.

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. 77.87% 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 runs 99.84% of the base -- the highest single-platform concentration in our corpus -- with Judge.me Reviews at 22.02%, Klarna Checkout at 20.22% and Klaviyo at 19.95%.
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 178,842 enriched companies and 823,048 total detected domains at TechnologyChecker.io.