I actually do know quite a few people who look up the imprint before shopping there, especially when they buy stuff as a business. You’re obviously right but it’s fairly easy to copy an imprint, and the whole shady lawyer thing for minor errors also is absolutely a pain.

I don’t think it’s completely useless, but it’s certainly not perfect either. As the parent comment suggested having a business register It’s legit domains would probably makes sense from a consumer protection point of view.

However, with the current state of the digital administration in Germany this change would introduce so much overhead that it would lead to a lot of justified opposition.

For well known shops: Probably nobody. But if I find a good price on an unknown (to me) shop I'll check the tax ID from the imprint on Google.

CRT.sh is also nice to figure out how long an operation has been using SSL (e.g. mtz-elektronik[dot]de is used by scammers on hacked Amazon shops since a few days).

Oh they do copy this information! I became victim of such a fraud because the whole website looked really legitimate to me, and I am the "tech guy" in our family. Thing is: fraudsters create good looking websites and just copy all the company information from other stores, put in a non-working telephone number and email and they are good to go. There are thousands of small businesses that sell stuff online.

One would argue that there is a Handesregistereintrag (record of commerce at the officials) that might help, but it only contain information about the seller including contact details and what the does, and not domains. And the record is not needed for small businesses.

TLDR: Germany seems to have hurdles for fraudsters, but they are easily taken by simply copying information from legit stores.

Yes, I do think it’s absolutely sensible to make something like this mandatory for people who sell stuff or have some kind of commercial interest.

However, the law is pretty unclear about what is considered commercial interest. This effectively leads to the situation where basically any site of any kind is expected to have an imprint or otherwise, you can expect to get a nice and expensive writing from a lawyer.