An analysis of European online shops and their domain names

Simone over at InternetX.com (an advertiser here) took a deep dive into the European ecommerce market. Analyzing domain choices around the continent.

The importance of domains for online shops

Domain names play a crucial role in creating and developing online businesses. First, from a technical point of view, they allow you to “reach” the shop on the internet. But the domain name has become more than just a technical requirement. It’s a vital part of your brand, around which all your marketing efforts revolve and it’s what Google and other search engines use to index your pages. Many digital native brands have built their brand identity around their domain name. A catchy and memorable domain name will help you stand out from the crowd, so choosing something that reflects what you do and who you are as a business is crucial.

The dataset of domain names of European e-shops

To get an overview of how the European e-commerce industry uses domains, we analyzed the internet database at Dataprovider.com. We looked for “real” online shops, meaning those websites that allow users to do online shopping, i.e., put a product in the cart and finalize a payment. This data was then filtered to only include online shops with offices in Europe. We obtained a dataset of 1,214,610 records, which takes a snapshot of the state of the web as of November 2022.

Which European countries host the highest number of online shops?

By analyzing the websites’ IPs, we could get an overview of which countries host the most online shops. The results are not surprising. The top 5 chart shows Europe’s largest economies.