At Divvy, we’ve seen customers use virtual cards to spend smarter within their budgets. We wanted to see exactly which vendors were getting the most virtual business from our customers.
A virtual card is a unique 16-digit card number that’s digitally-generated and tied to your account. Virtual cards are typically used for online transactions (since you can’t really hand a virtual card to a cashier) and most often, these cards are tied to a specific budget or vendor.
For example, if you have a monthly subscription to G Suite, you can set up a virtual card with recurring funds. Each month, your budget limit will reset so you always have enough to cover the cost of that vendor, but you won’t go over your limit.
Top virtual card purchases
We analyzed 1.5 million virtual card transactions from the last year and broke down our analysis by state to see which vendors were most popular regionally.
Here are the top virtual card vendors by state:
As expected, most of the names that showed up in our list were digital vendors. We predicted that Google and Facebook would pop up often (because of their popularity as online advertisers), but we were surprised by the landslide victory from Amazon.
28 of the 50 states had Amazon as their most popular online vendor.
In California alone, our customers spent over $9 million dollars on Amazon in the year 2019—and that’s just on virtual cards.
Which vendors surprised us
Google came in second, with seven states. Then, Facebook, with six, and we had a few stand alone entries as well:
- Companies in Nevada, home to one of the country’s entertainment capitals, made the most virtual card purchases from Ticketmaster—$750,000 in virtual card spend on shows and concerts.
- In the midwest, two states (Nebraska and South Dakota) made the most virtual purchases from UPS.
- Even Upwork, a popular site for hiring freelancers, won the top seat in Kansas. But the Sunflower state wasn’t the only one using virtual cards to pay freelancers. Californian businesses spent close to $500,000 on Upwork using virtual cards and New York was close behind.
Virtual card spend is still relatively small, but we’ve seen our customers fall in love with it. In 2019, virtual card share relative to total transaction volume increased by 15%—and we expect that increase to continue throughout 2020.
Divvy is free expense management software paired with smart corporate credit cards. If you want to learn more about our product, we’d love to schedule some time to chat.
