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%).
