Session Depth and Cart Signals Across Top German E-Commerce Sites — 2025–2026
Results as of
Review Jan 2025 – Mar 2026: OTTO and MediaMarkt record ~12% cart-signal rates — six times higher than idealo and CHECK24, whose long sessions reflect research rather than direct checkout
Info
- Sample size
- n = 11,809
- Data date
- Jan 2025 – Mar 2026
- Segment
- All segments
- Platform
- Browsing
- Market
- Germany
Analysis
A cart or checkout URL appeared in roughly 12% of OTTO and MediaMarkt browsing sessions in Germany between January 2025 and March 2026 — a share six times higher than on idealo, Apple, or CHECK24, where the figure drops below 2%. The contrast reveals two fundamentally different roles a shopping site can play: transaction hub versus research destination.
Why price-comparison sites show near-zero cart signals
Platforms like idealo and CHECK24 are designed to redirect purchase intent off-site to the cheapest retailer — they capture the decision, not the transaction. Germany's price-conscious consumers rely heavily on these tools: idealo alone receives tens of millions of monthly visits and enjoys high user loyalty. The median session on Lidl.de runs to ~99 seconds — the longest in the top 10 — suggesting deep engagement with weekly specials and the Lidl Plus loyalty offer, even as the platform's raw web reach declined in early 2026 (see the monthly share trend). Temu and AliExpress show the shortest median sessions (14s and ~20s respectively), consistent with feed-style discovery browsing that converts on repeat visits rather than single long sessions. For advertisers, the session-depth gap is a proxy for funnel position: high cart-signal rates indicate lower-funnel inventory, while comparison and feed-style sites offer upper-funnel reach at scale.
This analysis is based on public segment data. For deeper cuts, use our Enterprise interface.
Methodology
Each data point represents one of the top 10 German e-commerce brands. A session is defined as a unique combination of user and session identifier on the brand's domains. Sessions with zero recorded dwell time or longer than two hours were excluded. A cart signal is any session containing a URL path matching shopping-cart, basket, Warenkorb, checkout, wishlist, or Merkzettel terms. Median session duration in seconds is shown on the x-axis; the share of sessions with at least one cart-signal URL is on the y-axis. The observation window covers January 2025 through March 2026.