Afterpay is an Australian fintech company operating in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and the United States. Founded in 2014 by Nick Molnar and Anthony Eisen, the company enjoyed a first-mover advantage in the buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) space. Less than seven years later, the company reached 13.1 million active customers with gross sales amounting to $10.1 billion. Despite its success, some suggest the company has lost its edge in the buy-now-pay-later space with the emergence of several high-profile competitors exerting their influence and giving merchants more choice.
Competitor
Description
Key Insights
Competitive Overlap
Differentiation
Klarna
A Swedish fintech company offering “Buy Now, Pay Later” services globally. Klarna competes directly with Afterpay in the BNPL space.
Klarna provides BNPL services and partners with various online retailers to offer flexible payment options.
Both offer BNPL solutions, allowing customers to split payments, but they operate in different markets and have different retail partnerships.
Klarna’s global reach and extensive retail partnerships.
Affirm
A U.S.-based fintech company that offers point-of-sale financing, allowing consumers to finance purchases over time. Affirm competes with Afterpay in the BNPL sector.
Affirm enables customers to split purchases into easy payments and partners with online merchants to offer financing options.
Both provide BNPL solutions, but Affirm focuses on financing and has different merchant partnerships.
Affirm’s focus on financing options and diverse payment terms.
PayPal Credit
A service by PayPal that offers credit options, including installment payments. While not exclusively a BNPL provider, it competes with Afterpay in offering flexible payment options.
PayPal Credit allows users to finance purchases and split payments, offering flexibility at checkout.
Both offer flexible payment options, but PayPal Credit integrates with the PayPal ecosystem and has a broader range of services.
PayPal’s established user base and broader financial services.
Sezzle
A U.S.-based BNPL platform that allows consumers to split purchases into four interest-free payments. Sezzle competes with Afterpay in the BNPL space.
Sezzle offers split payments and partners with online retailers to provide financing options at checkout.
Both provide BNPL services, but Sezzle targets specific markets and emphasizes interest-free payments.
Sezzle’s focus on interest-free payments and niche markets.
QuadPay (Zip)
An installment payment service that enables customers to split purchases into four payments. QuadPay rebranded as Zip and operates in the BNPL space, competing with Afterpay.
Zip offers interest-free installment payments and partners with retailers to provide BNPL options.
Both operate in the BNPL sector, but Zip rebranded to expand its services and global presence.
Zip’s expansion into various markets and broader financial services.
Splitit
An international payment solution that allows consumers to pay for purchases with an existing credit card and split payments into installments. Splitit competes with Afterpay in providing flexible payment options.
Splitit enables customers to split payments without the need for a new credit line and partners with online retailers.
Both offer flexible payment options, but Splitit’s approach leverages existing credit cards for installment payments.
Splitit’s utilization of existing credit lines and global reach.
Shop Pay Installments
A BNPL service offered by Shopify, which allows Shopify merchants to provide installment payments to their customers. It competes with Afterpay’s BNPL solutions.
Shop Pay Installments integrates with Shopify-powered online stores, offering customers the option to split payments into installments.
Both provide BNPL solutions, but Shop Pay Installments is integrated within the Shopify platform.
Integration with Shopify-powered online stores and ease of use for merchants.
Laybuy
A New Zealand-based BNPL provider that allows customers to split payments into six weekly interest-free installments. Laybuy competes with Afterpay in the BNPL space.
Laybuy offers BNPL services in multiple markets and partners with online retailers to provide payment flexibility.
Both offer BNPL solutions, but Laybuy’s emphasis on weekly payments and market presence sets it apart.
Laybuy’s weekly payment structure and global expansion.
Openpay
An Australian-based BNPL platform offering flexible payment options, including extended payment plans. Openpay competes with Afterpay in the BNPL sector.
Openpay provides BNPL services and partners with online retailers, offering extended payment terms.
Both offer BNPL solutions, but Openpay focuses on extended payment plans and has a presence in specific markets.
Openpay’s emphasis on extended payment options and market presence.
Humm (Flexigroup)
An Australian BNPL provider offering customers the option to buy now and pay later with various payment plans. Humm competes with Afterpay in the BNPL space.
Humm provides BNPL services with different payment plans and partners with retailers to offer flexibility at checkout.
Both offer BNPL solutions, but Humm’s various payment plans and market focus differentiate it.
Humm’s diverse payment options and market presence.
Table of Contents
Zip
Zip is another Australian fintech company founded approximately one year before Afterpay. The company offers the interest-free Zip Pay digital wallet with BNPL functionality and also the free budget planner and personal finance app Pocketbook. For those desiring a line of credit for larger purchases, Zip Money is also available.
PayPal makes money primarily by processing customer transactions on the Payments Platform and from other value-added services. Thus, the revenues streams are divided into transaction revenues based on the volume of activity or total payments volume. And value-added services, such as interest and fees earned on loans and interest receivable. As of 2020 PayPal generated over $21.5 billion in net revenues with a 25% operating margin.
In March 2021, PayPal announced plans to launch its deferred payment service for Australian merchants. The service, dubbed PayPal Pay in 4, was launched in the US, UK, and France the previous year in response to high consumer demand.
The payment service appears in the PayPal wallet at checkout and eCommerce businesses can also advertise the option using a dedicated button on their website. When it was launched in Australia, PayPal Pay in 4 was immediately available to the more than 9 million PayPal members.
Apple has a business model that is broken down between products and services. Apple generated over $365 billion in revenues in 2021, of which $191.9 came from the iPhone sales, $35.2 came from Mac sales, $38.3 came from accessories and wearables (AirPods, Apple TV, Apple Watch, Beats products, HomePod, iPod touch, and accessories), $31.86 billion came from iPad sales, and $68.4 billion came from services.
Bloomberg reported in July 2021 that Apple was working on a service to let shoppers pay for purchases in installments. The loans would be underwritten by Goldman Sachs Group Inc., a partner of the company since the Apple credit card was launched in 2019.
Apple represents a significant source of competition in the fertile North American market. The tech giant also recently announced it would partner with Affirm PayBright to offer a BNPL solution for Apple device purchases in Canada.
The Commonwealth Bank of Australia
The Commonwealth Bank of Australia is a large multinational bank with business interests across Australia, New Zealand, Asia, the US, and the UK.
The bank launched StepPay in August 2021, a BNPL service for purchases over $100. More than 86,000 consumers pre-registered for the service before it was released in Australia. StepPay can be added to the existing CommBank app or digital wallet on smartphones and tablets.
Splitit
Splitit is a fintech company founded by Israeli entrepreneurs Gil Don and Alon Feit in 2009. The platform was initially created to allow consumers to use existing credit to make BNPL purchases.
Splitit relies on transaction fees to make money, with the exact fee depending on how and when the merchant chooses to be paid.
Splitit does not charge consumers for late or missed payments. Nor does it charge interest on purchases. Instead, the company relies on transaction value and mass consumer uptake to make money.
Splitit is a BNPL service where consumers and businesses can leverage their existing Visa and Mastercard credit cards. Unlike competitor services, Splitit is not new financing. This means customers avoid paying interest because they aren’t required to carry new debt.
Afterpay is an Australian fintech company founded in 2014 by Nick Molnar and Anthony Eisen. The company enjoyed a first-mover advantage in the BNPL space but is now subject to increased competition in the Australian and North American markets.
Zip and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia are the most significant competitors in the Australian market, with the latter having access to a large user base.
Tech behemoths Apple and PayPal have also entered the industry, with Apple announcing plans to offer a BNPL solution in the United States and Canada in partnership with Goldman Sachs and Affirm respectively.
Key Highlights of Afterpay’s Competitors:
Zip:
Founded in Australia around the same time as Afterpay.
Offers Zip Pay with BNPL functionality and the Pocketbook app for budget planning.
Acquired QuadPay to expand into the North American market.
Major competitor in Australian, New Zealand, and North American markets.
PayPal:
Generates revenue from processing customer transactions and value-added services.
Launched PayPal Pay in 4, a deferred payment service, for merchants in various countries.
Offers a BNPL option through the PayPal wallet at checkout.
Started as a pay-later solution integrated to merchants’ checkouts, Affirm makes money from merchants’ fees as consumers pick up the pay-later solution. Affirm also makes money through interests earned from the consumer loans, when those are repurchased from the originating bank. In 2020 Affirm made 50% of its revenues from merchants’ fees, about 37% from interests, and the remaining from virtual cards and servicing fees.
Afterpay is a FinTech company providing as a core service the “buy now pay later” solution. When a consumer purchases a product, Afterpay pays the seller and asks the consumer to pay 25%. The remaining 75% is paid in three, fortnightly installments that are also interest-free. Afterpay, in turn, makes money via merchant and late fees.
Quadpay was an American fintech company founded by Adam Ezra and Brad Lindenberg in 2017. Ezra and Lindenberg witnessed the rising popularity of buy-now-pay-later service Afterpay in Australia and similar service Klarna in Europe. Quadpay collects a range of fees from both the merchant and the consumer via merchandise fees, convenience fees, late payment, and interchange fees.
Revolut is an English fintech company offering banking and investment services to consumers. Founded in 2015 by Nikolay Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko, the company initially produced a low-rate travel card. Storonsky in particular was an avid traveler who became tired of spending hundreds of pounds on currency exchange and foreign transaction fees. The Revolut app and core banking account are free to use. Instead, money is made through a combination of subscription fees, transaction fees, perks, and ancillary services.
Zoominfo is an American software-as-a-service (SaaS) company founded by Henry Schuck and Kirk Brown in 2007. The company sells access to the most comprehensive B2B database in the world to help sales and marketing teams better communicate with prospects. Zoominfo held an IPO in June 2020 raising $935 million. Like similar software companies that are valuable to remote teams, demand for the Zoominfo platform increased because of the coronavirus pandemic. It is now used by over 20,000 businesses, with clients including T-Mobile, Zoom, Amazon, and Google.
Spotify is the world’s largest music streaming platform with over 381 million users across 184 markets around the world. The company was founded by Martin Lorentzon and Daniel Ek in 2008 in response to the shutdown of peer-to-peer music service Napster. Spotify became a success because it was the first company to determine how to distribute music legally and compensate the music industry at the same time. The platform now offers various curated music discovery services, music stations, audio customization, and private listening. In recent times, it has also ventured into the streaming of audiobooks, podcasts, comedy, poetry, and short stories.
Poshmark is a social commerce marketplace where users can buy and sell new or used clothing. The company was founded in 2011 by Manish Chandra, Tracy Sun, Gautam Golwala, and Chetan Pungaliya. Poshmark is one of many companies looking to profit from the explosive growth in the second-hand clothing and resale industry, which is expected to be worth around $51 billion by 2023. Scores of women, in particular, are opting to sell their unwanted fashion items online instead of donating them to charity or thrift stores.
Afterpay is an Australian fintech company operating in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and the United States. Founded in 2014 by Nick Molnar and Anthony Eisen, the company enjoyed a first-mover advantage in the buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) space. Less than seven years later, the company reached 13.1 million active customers with gross sales amounting to $10.1 billion. Despite its success, some suggest the company has lost its edge in the buy-now-pay-later space with the emergence of several high-profile competitors exerting their influence and giving merchants more choice.
Carvana is an online used car retailer with vending machines located around the United States. The company was founded in 2012 by Ryan Keeton, Ben Huston, and Ernest Garcia III. The company is the fastest growing online used car retailer in North America and was recently one of the youngest companies to be added to the Fortune 500 list. While Carvana is currently the only American company selling cars in vending machines, its growth and success have not gone unnoticed by other players. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the company’s major competitors.
Carvana is an online used car retailer with vending machines located around the United States. The company was founded in 2012 by Ryan Keeton, Ben Huston, and Ernest Garcia III. The company is the fastest growing online used car retailer in North America and was recently one of the youngest companies to be added to the Fortune 500 list. While Carvana is currently the only American company selling cars in vending machines, its growth and success have not gone unnoticed by other players. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the company’s major competitors.
GoodRx is an American healthcare company known for its telemedicine platform and a website and mobile app that track prescription drug prices. As part of this service, the company makes drug coupons available for free to consumers. GoodRx was created by Trevor Bezdek, Doug Hirsch, and Scott Marlette. Hirsch, an early employee at both Yahoo and Facebook, got the idea for the company after picking up a prescription with private health insurance and still having to pay $450. Given the high variability in prices between different pharmacies, Hirsh went on a mission to make prescription drug prices more transparent and affordable for ordinary Americans. Revenue in the second quarter of 2021 amounted to $177 million with over 7.5 million app customers using the GoodRx app. While the company was the first to provide a comprehensive list of pharmacy drug prices, new players have entered the market. The rest of this article will be devoted to looking at the main GoodRx competitors.
DoorDash is an online food ordering and delivery platform founded by Tony Xu, Stanley Tang, Andy Fang, and Evan Moore in 2013. Together with its subsidiaries, DoorDash has a 56% market share in food delivery and a further 60% in the convenience delivery sector.
In 1965, PepsiCo acquired Frito-Lay in what the chairmen of both companies called a “marriage made in heaven”. The resultant company transformed PepsiCo from a soft drink organization and set it on a path to becoming one of the world’s leading food and beverage companies. Today, PepsiCo claims to operate in more than 200 countries and territories around the world with seven distinct divisions and many successful brands.
The Coca-Cola Company has 21 different billion-dollar brands or brands that generate more than $1 billion or more in revenue each year. The company also sells its products in nearly every country in the world, with Cuba and North Korea the only two countries where it is not sold officially. What’s more, the Coca-Cola brand is worth $87.6 billion, making it one of the most valuable among all companies. Though these figures allow Coca-Cola to enjoy market dominance in many countries, the company is nevertheless subject to intense competition.
Headquartered in Burbank, California, Disney has global reach and influence with its universally popular resorts, movies, streaming services, video games, and merchandise. But as one of the largest media conglomerates in the world with a diverse range of products in multiple marketplaces, Disney is no stranger to competition.
International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is an American multinational technology company. It was founded in New York as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in 1911 by Charles Ranlett Flint. IBM is a diverse company with a similarly diverse portfolio of products and services. It produces and sells hardware, middleware, and software. It also offers hosting and consultancy services in nanotechnology and mainframe computers. What’s more, IBM has a strong culture in research and development, filing the most U.S. patents of any business for the past 28 years.
Starbucks is a multinational coffee chain headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It was founded by Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl, and Gordon Bowker in 1971. From a single and very humble bean roasting store in Pike Place Market, the company is now a global giant operating almost 33,000 stores around the world. This large global footprint obviously increases the competition for Starbucks in many different markets. The coffee industry itself is also highly competitive, with established players including McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts.
Boeing is best known for designing and manufacturing commercial aircraft, but the company also produces helicopters, rockets, satellites, spacecraft, missiles, and telecommunications infrastructure. Founded in 1916 by William Boeing in Seattle, Washington, the company is one of the largest aerospace manufacturers and defense contractors in the world.
While Google (now Alphabet) has been born as a search engine, it is now a diversified company, even though its core business remains search, as most of its revenues still come from Google, the search engine, and YouTube, the “video engine.” However, as a tech giant, which business is primarily based on advertising, the company does compete with Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft (with Bing), and Amazon (with e-commerce search and its advertising machine).
Peloton is a media and exercise equipment company primarily making money making money via its fitness products. The idea for the company came from John Foley, who argued that technology could help time-poor individuals get a full workout at home. The company competes with other players like Bowflex, NordicTrack, Life Fitness, MYX Fitness.
IKEA was founded in 1943 by Swedish businessman Ingvar Kamprad as a mail-order catalog business. The company is best known for selling affordable flat-pack furniture, but it also sells home accessories and kitchen appliances. Today, IKEA offers approximately 9,500 products across 445 stores in 52 countries. With such broad reach, IKEA is not immune to competition.
The Airbnb story began in 2008 when two friends shared their accommodation with three travelers looking for a place to stay. Just over a decade later, it is estimated that the company now accounts for over 20% of the vacation rental industry. As a travel platform, Airbnb competes with other brands like Booking.com, VRBO, FlipKey, and given its massive amount of traffic from Google. Also, platforms like Google Travel can be considered potential competitors able to cannibalize part of Airbnb’s market.
Salesforce is a cloud-based customer relationshipmanagement (CRM) provider, allowing businesses to build meaningful and sustained relationships with their customers. With robust, customizable software that integrates with social media, Gmail, and Microsoft Outlook, the Salesforce CRM platform is rated highly among businesses of all shapes and sizes. Recent data has shown that the company has captured 19.5% of the global CRM market.
In just fifteen short years, Shopify has grown from humble beginnings to become one of the fastest-growing eCommerce platforms online. The Shopify eCommerce solution is perhaps best suited to users who desire an easy, flexible and affordable starter solution for their online store. The provider now has upwards of 820,000 stores accounting for 20% of the total market share. However, the continued success of any company in the dynamic digital market is never guaranteed.
Netflix is the largest streaming video subscription service in the world. Created by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in 1997, the company has revolutionized the video content subscriptionmodel with over 139 million subscribers in 190 countries. The success of Netflix is due to two factors. The first is a recommendation system that gives suggestions on what customers should watch based on their viewing history. The second is the vast catalog of content on offer – produced by third parties and by Netflix itself. These factors have resulted in Netflix competing against influential TV networks and film producers for viewership.
YouTube is the most popular online video platform, a hybrid between a video search engine and a social media platform with a continuous feed prompted by social interactions and engagement. In fact, the platform is so popular that YouTube.com is the second most visited website on the internet. After being acquired by Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion, the platform now boasts over 2 billion registered users. Collectively, these users upload 500 hours of video every minute. The platform competes with other video engines like Vimeo, Dailymotion, and social platforms like IGTV, TikTok, and Twitch.
Zoom is a video platform, which enabled remote working. As such it competes with other large tech players like Google and Microsoft for the productivity space, and other startups like Slack and Go-To-Meetings.
As an electric automaker and builder of sports cars and now trucks, Tesla’s competitors comprise companies like Ford, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Lamborghini, Audi, Rivian Lucid Motors, Toyota, and more. At the same time, Tesla is an electric energy production and storage company (SolarCity); it competes with Sunrun, SunPower, and Vivint Solar. And as an autonomous driving company, it competes with companies like Zoox, Waymo, and Baidu with the self-driving software.
Amazon is a consumer e-commerce platform with a diversified business model spanning across e-commerce, cloud, advertising, streaming, and more. Over the years, Amazon acquired several companies. As it operates across several industries, Amazon has a wide range of competitors across each of those industries. For instance, Amazon E-commerce competes with Shopify, Wix, Google, Etsy, eBay, BigCommerce.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
