US competitor update
Not much happening at the bottom of the pile...
APT still has a bit of catching up to do with Affirm and Paypal credit but should get there in ~ 6 months at this rate.
US visits to different competitors in last 30 days:
Seems like 500k of Afterpay's total US hits per month come through direct links (likely customers paying through Afterpay at merchant sites). This is close to 565k through Affirm. Also seems like Sezzle gets a lot of direct hits and very little referral hits... odd.
Anecdotally it also seems Afterpay gets more sales than Affirm when a merchant uses both, e.g. goat.com which has 3.2 million monthly visits.
According to below article Affirm has 2,000 merchant partners as of last week, about the same as Afterpay even though it started operating in 2012. It is both concerning and exciting to see Walmart partnering with Affirm - concerning because this will give them a big boost, exciting because this is further validation from one of US's largest retailers that the ability to pay by instalments is here to stay.
https://www.affirm.com/press/releases/affirm-and-walmart-announce-omnichannel-partnership
As others have pointed out, Affirm has a different business model, similar to Zip - charge the customer interest, with extended payback periods (3-12 months).
Also interesting to note Affirm has raised over $1 billion AUD . I believe APT's lifetime total raised is <$200 million, yet APT is a lot more valuable in both my opinion and from a valuation stand-point, Affirm last being valued ~ $2 billion US and APT's market valuation currently ~ $3.3 billion US.
