Stores That Accept Apple Pay

With 10+ years in web crawling and technographic data analysis, I've examined 1,273,419 active Apple Pay domains and enriched 292,833 of them with firmographic data (a 14.8% match rate) at TechnologyChecker.io. As of our March 2026 crawl, Apple Pay tells an unusual story in the payment processing space. Apple Pay isn't a standalone payment processor competing head-to-head with Stripe or PayPal. It's a wallet layer riding on top of existing payment infrastructure, and that distinction shapes everything about its adoption data.

Growth Trajectory

Apple Pay's web presence was negligible until early 2017, sitting at a single detected domain for nearly four years. Then Shopify rolled out Apple Pay support natively, and the trajectory changed overnight. For more context, see our Shopify analytics and market trends. By January 2018, active domains jumped to 13,754. The growth stayed steady through 2019 at around 15,000 active domains, then the pandemic hit. From January 2020 to December 2020, Apple Pay domains went from 15,470 to 106,445 - a 7x increase in twelve months. Three forces converged: contactless payment demand, Shopify's explosive growth, and consumer preference for frictionless mobile checkout.

Growth continued through 2024 and into early 2025, peaking at 621,072 active domains in April 2025. Since then, there's been a pullback to 503,763 by July 2025. Not panic-worthy. It coincides with Shopify's periodic pruning of inactive storefronts. The total-domains-ever figure of 2,006,738 vs. 1,273,419 currently active gives a 3.1:1 churn ratio, typical for Shopify-dependent technologies where stores open and close frequently.

Sales Signal: Apple Pay's active domain count grew 40x between January 2020 and April 2025. Even with the recent pullback, this is a technology on a growth curve, not a mature plateau. The 1.36 million previously-used domains represent merchants who once accepted Apple Pay but shuttered their stores. For payment platform vendors, that's a recycling opportunity: new businesses replacing old ones on the same infrastructure.

"Apple Pay went from under 16,000 domains to over 600,000 in five years. That's not organic growth. That's platform-level distribution through Shopify. Any payment technology that wants similar reach needs a similar platform partnership." - Mehmet Suleyman, CEO at TechnologyChecker.io

Customer Profile

83% of Apple Pay customers have 1-10 employees. Another 10.78% have 11-50. This is overwhelmingly a micro-business technology, which makes sense given Shopify's core audience of independent merchants and DTC brands. The 2010s cohort (companies founded 2010-2019) makes up 43.3% of the user base, with 2020s-founded companies at 31.2%. Three-quarters of Apple Pay merchants are less than 16 years old.

Enterprise adoption is thin but notable. Only 0.6% of enriched companies have 10,001+ employees, but those include Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Target, Samsung, HP, Ford, Meta, Uber, and Home Depot. These aren't side projects. Bank of America's detection spans promotions.bankofamerica.com and healthaccounts.bankofamerica.com. Target runs it site-wide. These are company-wide integrations across customer-facing properties, not microsite experiments. Apple has no published customer case study page for Apple Pay on the web, so these detections come from our crawl data alone.

Sales Signal: The core Apple Pay merchant is a small DTC brand with fewer than 10 employees, founded in the last decade, running Shopify. For B2B sellers targeting this base, the value proposition needs to match: affordable, self-serve, and optimized for mobile-first commerce. Enterprise Apple Pay adopters (Target, Bank of America) are separate conversations entirely - they're evaluating Apple Pay as part of a multi-wallet strategy alongside Google Pay and Venmo.

Industry and Geographic Concentration

Retail dominates at 17.74%, and when you add Retail Apparel (10.8%), Luxury Goods (3.06%), and Retail Health (1.58%), retail-adjacent verticals account for over 30% of all Apple Pay merchants. Food and Beverage Services (4.01%) and Manufacturing (3.95%) round out the top five. This is the most retail-concentrated payment technology we track.

Geographically, the US holds 46.4% of enriched companies. The UK adds 12.4%, Australia 8.0%, and Canada 6.8%. English-speaking markets together control 73%+ of the Apple Pay install base. That mirrors Apple's iPhone market share, which is highest in the US (55%+), Australia, UK, and Canada. Germany at 4.1% and France at 2.6% represent Western European growth markets where Apple's device share is still expanding.

Sales Signal: If you're selling checkout optimization tools or payment analytics, the highest-density Apple Pay segments are US and UK retailers in apparel, food & beverage, and luxury goods. The Australian market is disproportionately represented at 8.0% of merchants despite the country's small population, indicating particularly strong Apple device penetration driving merchant adoption there.

Why there is no migration section on this page

An earlier version of this analysis reported gain ratios of 3.1:1, 5.3:1 and 4.1:1 against other wallets. Those numbers were withdrawn. Apple Pay's detection includes [aria-labelledby='pi-apple_pay'], one of the accepted-payment logos Shopify renders in the storefront footer, and 99.7% of the domains counted here run Shopify. Wallets are additive in any case: of the domains that have ever carried both Apple Pay and Visa, 93.3% still carry both, and 91.7% for Amazon Pay. A checkout that gains a wallet almost never gives one up.

Sales Signal: Express checkout is a stacking decision, not a choice between wallets. The merchant question is how many buttons to show before the checkout gets cluttered.

Technology Ecosystem

Shop Pay appears on 90.11% of Apple Pay domains, PayPal on 76%, Visa and Mastercard on about 62.5% each and American Express on 58.36%, with Shopify at 99.79% and Cloudflare at 99.86%.

The informative number is the 62.5%. The card brands sit at 99%+ of each other because they share one footer element; Apple Pay sits 37 points below that, which means roughly a third of its detections come from the integration signals in its rule — script#apple-pay-shop-capabilities, input#applePayMerchantId, the ApplePay and braintree.applePay globals — rather than from the icon. That is why Apple Pay's count is 43% larger than Visa's despite appearing in the same footers.

The merchant stack below reads Google Analytics 48.64%, Google Tag Manager 46.94%, Facebook Pixel 46.17%, Klaviyo 21.61%, Judge.me Reviews 20.21%, Klaviyo Reviews 17.94%, Klarna Checkout 14.06% and TikTok Pixel 11.64% — a direct-to-consumer merchant running paid social and lifecycle email.

Key Takeaways

1. Apple Pay grew 40x in five years, driven almost entirely by Shopify's native integration. From 15,470 domains in January 2020 to 621,072 in April 2025. Platform distribution beats individual merchant adoption every time.
2. 83% micro-businesses, but Fortune 500 is present too. Bank of America, Target, Samsung, and Uber all run Apple Pay site-wide. The enterprise and micro-business use cases are completely different sale motions.
3. Retail-adjacent verticals own 30%+ of the install base. Apparel, food, luxury goods, and general retail dominate. This is the most vertically concentrated payment method we track.
4. English-speaking markets control 73%. US (46.4%), UK (12.4%), Australia (8.0%), and Canada (6.8%). Apple device market share is the demand driver.
5. Migration is one-directional: PayPal products to Apple Pay. 54,565 companies gained from PayPal Button alone, with only 7,819 going the other direction. Merchants add Apple Pay; they rarely remove it.
6. The Shopify-Visa-Apple Pay-Klaviyo stack defines the modern DTC merchant. 79.4% Shopify overlap, 87.9% Visa, 34.1% Klaviyo.

Sales Applications

Outreach template for Shopify merchants without Apple Pay:

"Hi [Name], I noticed [Company] runs Shopify but hasn't enabled Apple Pay at checkout. Our data shows 79.4% of Shopify merchants now accept Apple Pay, and those merchants tend to accept 5+ payment methods on average. Given your [industry] focus, enabling wallet-based checkout could reduce cart abandonment for mobile shoppers. Want to see what similar [industry] merchants are doing?"

Targeting strategy: Filter the Apple Pay install base by company size (1-10 employees), industry (Retail or Retail Apparel), geography (US or UK), and tech stack (Shopify + Klaviyo). This narrows to the highest-engagement DTC segment: small Shopify merchants in English-speaking markets investing in marketing automation.

Competitive angle: Don't position Apple Pay against Stripe or PayPal. They coexist. Position it as a conversion rate play: merchants who accept Apple Pay alongside their existing processor see higher mobile checkout completion. 87.9% Visa and 78.7% Google Pay overlap. Merchants don't choose one wallet. They stack them.

Explore the full Apple Pay install base with company-level filtering at TechnologyChecker.io. Our dataset covers 1,273,419 active Apple Pay domains with 292,833 enriched companies including industry, size, location, and tech stack data. Use the "Create Lead List" feature to build targeted prospect lists from this data.