African online stores in 2026: what 379,391 websites show
In October 2026 we checked every website under 28 African country domains that Common Crawl lists. Here is what the 11,802 online stores among them look like, how we counted, and the data.
Last updated: 28 October 2026
Key findings
- 379,391 domains checked, 115,813 live websites, 11,802 online stores.
- 37% of the stores have a serious problem that can stop orders: a shop page with prices but no working cart or checkout (31%), no HTTPS (3%), a parked or empty page, or pages slower than 8 seconds.
- 77% have no WhatsApp button on the homepage.
- Platforms: WooCommerce 39%, Shopify 28%, custom or unknown 19%, WordPress 5%, Wix 4%, PrestaShop and YouCan 1% each.
- Arabic text appears on only 7% of Moroccan stores (129 of 1,839) and 6% of Tunisian ones (6 of 102), against 36% in Egypt (78 of 214).
- In a separate count, 96.5% of 24,227 shops mapped on OpenStreetMap in 20 African cities list no website at all.
By country
| Country | Domains checked | Live sites | Online stores | Serious problem | WhatsApp button | Shopify | WooCommerce |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| South Africa | 228,895 | 65,310 | 5,926 | 31% | 15% | 2,476 | 2,257 |
| Kenya | 32,102 | 13,573 | 2,071 | 45% | 35% | 190 | 973 |
| Morocco | 27,165 | 10,864 | 1,839 | 36% | 32% | 408 | 711 |
| Nigeria | 22,479 | 4,145 | 374 | 68% | 24% | 46 | 95 |
| Egypt | 3,771 | 1,692 | 214 | 34% | 32% | 69 | 62 |
| Côte d'Ivoire | 4,356 | 1,817 | 178 | 40% | 33% | 13 | 79 |
| Algeria | 4,649 | 2,032 | 169 | 27% | 11% | 8 | 89 |
| Mauritius | 2,869 | 782 | 119 | 39% | 22% | 47 | 34 |
| Cameroon | 7,952 | 2,804 | 107 | 49% | 17% | 5 | 40 |
| Tunisia | 2,326 | 640 | 102 | 38% | 23% | 18 | 28 |
| Angola | 3,672 | 1,519 | 101 | 43% | 23% | 9 | 33 |
| Tanzania | 4,914 | 1,605 | 96 | 61% | 32% | 4 | 25 |
| Zimbabwe | 3,778 | 1,012 | 61 | 41% | 21% | 5 | 33 |
| Botswana | 3,189 | 1,454 | 60 | 38% | 20% | 8 | 23 |
| Senegal | 2,309 | 581 | 56 | 48% | 23% | 2 | 30 |
| Ghana | 1,928 | 657 | 49 | 37% | 18% | 5 | 24 |
| Other 12 countries | 23,037 | 5,326 | 280 | 55% | 22% | 34 | 88 |
| Total | 379,391 | 115,813 | 11,802 | 37% | 23% | 3,347 | 4,624 |
Serious problem and WhatsApp button are shares of each country's stores. Countries are sorted by number of stores.
How we counted
- Domains: Common Crawl's list of domains seen from July to September 2026 gave 734,886 domains under African country codes. We kept 552,517 in 28 markets and dropped free or spam-heavy country codes and government and university sites.
- Visit: on 24 October 2026 a script looked up each domain and loaded its homepage once. 379,391 domains were checked and 115,813 answered with a live website.
- Online store: a live homepage with cart or checkout signals, or prices in a local currency.
- Problems: no checkout (prices but no cart or checkout), no HTTPS, parked or empty, outdated (copyright year before 2023), not mobile (no mobile layout), no page title, and slow (over 8 seconds on a slower second check).
- Serious problem: no checkout, no HTTPS, parked or empty, or slow.
Limits
- Only country-code domains (such as .co.za, .co.ke or .ma). Many stores use .com or .shop, especially in Nigeria, Egypt and Ghana, so these countries are under-counted.
- One automatic visit to the homepage only: some stores are missed, and some sites counted as stores are not.
- Speed was measured from Lebanon and rechecked only for the 1,500 strongest leads, so slow pages are under-counted and times are higher than local visitors see.
Use the data
Free to quote and reuse under CC BY 4.0, with a link to this page.
Download the table by country (CSV)
Questions: [email protected].