Many people use Google search to find their preferred online shops when shopping on the internet. Unsurprisingly, Amazon leads this ranking. However, several German companies are also represented in the top 10.
According to a detailed Google analysis by the agency Buzzlink in collaboration with digital marketing expert Aaron Kübler, people in Germany search for the names of the top 100 highest-grossing online shops around 68 million times per month. Amazon tops the ranking by a significant margin, recording 21.7 million searches in March alone, which is more than the combined searches for the shops ranked 16 to 100.
Following Amazon are well-known names like Media-Markt with 3.8 million searches, Ikea with 3.56 million, Lidl with 2.11 million, and Bonprix with 1.94 million searches. Notably, the Chinese provider Temu, despite being active in Germany for only about a year, has already garnered 1.9 million searches. The Chinese fashion retailer Shein and the German competitor Zalando have also made it into the top 10, with Shein receiving 1.47 million and Zalando 1.59 million searches.
These figures highlight Amazon’s dominance in the German e-commerce market, but also the rising significance of Chinese providers, who have achieved substantial search volumes in a short time.
“Amazon’s top position in our ranking of the most searched online shops in Germany was expected, but I was surprised that the two Chinese online retailers, Temu and Shein, managed to break into the top 10 in such a short time,” says Aaron Kübler. He emphasizes that while search volume for shop names is a good indicator of brand strength, it’s important not to forget that customers also search on Google for products and brands sold by these shops. Multi-brand online shops like Media-Markt and Zalando, as well as direct-to-consumer providers with brands like Apple and Nike, leverage their strengths compared to the hyped Chinese retailers.
For the analysis, Buzzlink and Kübler referred to the annual online shop ranking from the EHI Retail Institute and EcommerceDB and expanded it to include Temu. The search volume data for the shops on Google was gathered using the Google Keyword Planner and the SEO tools Ahrefs and Semrush, based on the 30 days prior to April 2, 2024. The average of the displayed values was then calculated and used for the ranking. For shops with multi-word names, the search volume of both separated and combined variants was added together.