The German company InterNetX has published a review on online stores in European countries and the domains they use. His data suggests that the number of Internet users making purchases on the global network is steadily growing. So, in 2016, 63% of users made purchases in online stores, and in 2022 this share increased to 75%. At the same time, in some countries, almost every user has purchased something on the Internet at least once during the last year: in the Netherlands this figure is 94%, in Denmark and Norway - 92%.
Russia is among the top five countries in Europe that provide hosting services to the largest number of online stores: the share of our country is 6.7% of the total. Germany leads here - 20.7%, the Netherlands is in second place - 13.2%, followed by the UK (11.5%) and France (9.5%).
When it comes to domain names preferred by e-commerce businesses, the situation in Europe is very different from situation in the North American or Asian market. In these regions, generic top-level domains - led, of course, by .COM - account for 86.2% and 67.6% of all domain names used by online stores. In Europe, 69.6% of online stores operate on domains in national domain zones. The leader, however, here is the .COM domain - 25.8% of all domains of European online stores. 15.5% are in the German ccTLD .DE, 8% are in the Netherlands ccTLD .NL. The top five is closed by the national domains of Great Britain .UK and Russia .RU - 7.6% and 4.6% respectively. As for the new generic top-level domains, their share is quite modest - about 3%. The leader here is the .SHOP domain, followed by .STORE and .ONLINE.
