My rude opinion: imprint is nonsense. It does not protect you from fake shops at all. It’s no brainer to copy one from another shop. As a legit seller you can be sued by shady layers for errors in imprint. Who is looking in public registers while shopping online…
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.
Family members as commercial buyers not only read imprints, but also check the seller and his company in various scoring portals. In commercial domain nice consumer protection does not exist anymore.
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).
