Online shopping has taken off in the last two decades, with an American survey revealing that over half of people prefer to shop digitally. Online shoppers are often presented with a myriad of payment methods from which to choose. A new study set out to find the most popular payment methods around the world and found that Apple Pay is the 5th most popular online payment option worldwide.
Ian Wright for Merchant Machine:
Based on data that reflects how shoppers choose to pay on the internet’s one million most visited websites, most of the world will choose Visa, the most popular payment method in 67 countries. One such country is the United States, where you’ll find one in three of the world’s Visa credit cards.
Among the other countries where Visa dominates are the UAE, Brazil and a myriad of European countries like France, Spain and Sweden. Not among them, however, is the United Kingdom, where Visa is currently battling lawsuits from 2,300 local claimants.
Instead, the UK belongs to the collection of 63 countries that prefer to pay online with PayPal — in fact, nine in ten online shoppers in the UK used PayPal for at least one transaction between 2020 and 2021.
PayPal claims the largest slice of the market in Asia (23.75%), Europe (23.14%), Oceania (19.96%) and Africa (25.06%)… But PayPal isn’t as powerful in North and South America, where Visa leads with 15.08% and 30% shares of the local market, respectively. Interestingly, on those continents where PayPal does come first, Visa always ranks second — but North and South America’s second most popular options, respectively, are MasterCard (which currently counts 293 million credit cards in the U.S. alone) and American Express.
Despite their global domination, Visa and PayPal aren’t the only payment methods out there. Based on how the world likes to shop on the one million most visited websites, the payment services of tech behemoths Apple (7.37% of the market), Amazon (6.04%) and Google (4.3%) are also used widely, as well as Shopify (5.17%), Stripe (3.89%) and Venmo (2.61%).
MacDailyNews Note: Apple Pay is simple to set up. Just add your credit or debit card to the Wallet app on your iPhone and you’re ready to go. You still get all your card’s rewards and benefits — so you won’t miss out on any hard-earned points or miles. More info here.
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Love using Apple Pay online and at brick and mortar stores. Simple and secure. Its adoption by retailers seems to be growing. I don’t understand why it’s not above PayPal. I avoid PayPal whenever possible. I’ve chosen not to purchase something because PayPal was only option. With Apple’s war chest, they could do a lot to incentivize both retailer adoption and customer use of Apple Pay.
Note that the report is only for online payments via a website. I’m sure Paypal has a good foothold in relation to Apple Pay there.
Apple Pay is the standard, nuff said.
I’ll stick with cash, thanks. Odd how you libertarians are just fine with being digitally tracked on everything you buy and everywhere you go.
Valid concern, but what’s really worse is how easy it has become to massively over-spend. Apple has become “successful” by gameifying accumulating credit card debt. The slick interfaces, satisfying clicks, pings and buzzes are no less insidious than what Facebook, Tik Tok and others do to associate interaction with pleasant dopamine release.
Apple Pay is the best overall option for the buyer.
Sellers who depend on data mining for profit don’t like it so much.
MDN’s comment makes me wonder if Apple Pay, Google Pay, Paypal (and other e-wallets) percentages reported show a total of usages via the e-wallet (e.g. Visa/Mastercard/Discover/Amex) in addition to Apple/Paypal/etc. brand payment services. In short for example is a portion of e-wallet values for Visa cards in the e-wallet counted twice.
Yea. If you use an Apple Card vs Apple Pay? How is that counted?
I’m going to lean toward the reported numbers above defined as what was used at the point of purchase and not the underlying credit group that processes the credit transaction. Reporting on the latter would probably mean Visa would be #1 by far.
Also noticed that the small print on the chart specifies online payments. e-wallets including Apple Pay would probably not make the top 5 if all payment methods including chip and swipe were considered. Hard to beat Visa/MasterCard/Amex/Discover/JCB in the offline payment world.