Count how many online stores carry an Afterpay script and you get 3.6%. Most of those stores never chose Afterpay. On Square Online it shows on 98.7% of 309,665 stores, because it comes with the platform. Take out the methods a platform bundles for nearly every store and Afterpay falls to 1.4%.
That correction is built into the first edition of the DTC Payment Methods Index, a monthly count of which ways to pay online stores show, measured on 15,471,206 stores scanned between 3 July and 31 October 2026. Here is what it found, how we measured it, and what it cannot tell you.
What stores show
21.4% of the stores in the sample show at least one payment method on their website. These are the most common, as a share of all 15,471,206 stores:
| Method | Share of stores showing it |
|---|---|
| Apple Pay | 13.7% |
| PayPal | 12.9% |
| Google Pay | 12.6% |
| Shop Pay | 11.8% |
| Klarna | 3.0% |
| Stripe | 1.9% |
| Afterpay | 1.4% |
Two of these need a note before anyone quotes them. Shop Pay is Shopify's own one-tap checkout, so it shows up almost only on Shopify stores. And Stripe's 1.9% is a floor, not an estimate: card processors often appear only on the payment page, which we do not open, so many stores that use Stripe are not counted.
Why Afterpay drops from 3.6% to 1.4%
When a method shows on 90% or more of one platform's stores, it came with the platform. It was not a decision each store made. The index leaves those detections out of every headline share and lists them in the platform table instead, marked as bundled.
Afterpay on Square Online is the clearest case, and most of the gap between 3.6% and 1.4% comes from it. Counting those stores would tell you how many stores are on Square Online, not how many merchants decided to offer pay-later.
The same trap sits under any adoption figure built from technology detection. If a number for a payment method doesn't say how it treats platform bundles, it is partly a count of platform market share.
By country
In the US, the UK, Canada and Germany, about a third of stores show at least one method, well above the 21.4% for the whole sample.
| Stores in | Show at least one method |
|---|---|
| United Kingdom | 35.8% |
| Canada | 33.5% |
| United States | 33.1% |
| Germany | 30.7% |
| All stores in the sample | 21.4% |
The country is the one our crawler filed the store under. The report has the top methods for each country, and the CSV has all of them.
Busier stores show more ways to pay
The share of stores showing at least one method climbs with traffic: from 24.5% of stores with under 1,000 visits a month to 44.2% of stores with 100,000 to 1 million. Traffic bands use measured monthly visits from SimilarWeb, so only stores that have such a figure are in a band.
The data shows the pattern, not the reason. Bigger stores may add express buttons and pay-later messages to their product pages more often, or sit on different platforms. This index cannot separate the two.
How we measured
- Our store crawler visits each online store's public website and records the technologies it finds there, including payment buttons, pay-later widgets and processor scripts.
- The sample is every store whose last scan fell between 3 July and 31 October 2026 and found at least one technology: 15,471,206 stores. A store counts once per method.
- Methods bundled by a platform on 90% or more of its stores are left out of the headline shares, as above.
- Countries and platforms are published only when they have enough stores, and a method is listed only when enough stores show it. The thresholds are printed on the report.
- Each edition is frozen when it is built and never edited afterwards. A new one is built on the 1st of every month, so changes show up as differences between editions, not as quiet edits.
What this does not measure
- It is not a measure of sales. A store showing a method tells you nothing about how many customers pay with it, how much they spend or whether it lifts conversion.
- We read the store's website, not its payment page. A method that appears only at the final payment step is missed. Not seeing a method does not mean a store doesn't offer it.
- Some choices are the platform's, even under the 90% line. Apple Pay and Google Pay are counted when a store's pages carry their button or script, and on Shopify those come with the platform's express checkout buttons. Where that falls short of the 90% rule it stays in the headline, so part of those shares reflects a platform setting rather than a decision each store made.
- A store is a website our crawler scanned and found at least one technology on. It is not a list of active businesses.
Look up one store
A store gets its own page at /accepts/<domain> when a recent scan found at least one way to pay. The page lists what we saw and the date we checked. A store with nothing detected, or no recent scan, has no page. Start at the store lookup.
Use the data
The report, the CSV download and a permanent link for each edition are at /research/payment-methods-index. It is free to cite with attribution. For developers, GET /api/v1/public/store-payments/{domain} returns the methods a store shows, from the latest edition, or a 404.
If you want the methods themselves explained, how Klarna, Afterpay, iDEAL or Pix work for a store, they are in the payment methods library, part of the free payments library we published today.