Retailers ranked in Internet Retailer’s 2016 Europe 500 banked the benefits of European consumers’ growing love for online shopping last year. Collectively, they grew 2015 web sales by 16.8%—more than e-retail growth in both Europe overall and the U.S.—to 145.01 billion euros ($161.60 billion) from 124.16 billion euros ($138.36 billion) in 2014.

Overall web sales in Europe reached 455.30 billion euros ($508.65 billion), up by 13.3% from 401.85 billion euros ($449.14 billion), according to E-commerce Europe. Europe accounted for an estimated 22.6% of $2.251 trillion in global e-commerce in 2015.

For perspective, European e-commerce topped online sales in the United States, where web shoppers spent $341.73 billion in 2015, by the U.S. Commerce Department’s measurements. U.S. web sales grew 14.6% from 2014.

The United Kingdom, Germany and France remain the big three in terms of European online sales. Their growth is fed by a combination of consumers’ expanded use of mobile devices, more omnichannel services and an uptick in cross-border sales. The biggest store-based retail players in the region, such as John Lewis and Debenhams in the United Kingdom and Media Saturn Group in Germany, were among the earliest around the world to implement omnichannel-related strategies that closely linked their web businesses to their stores—providing consumers convenient ordering and pickup options across all channels.

Termed click and collect in the United Kingdom, the service has been in place for years for some merchants, but many are only recently adding services to smooth the purchasing process for their customers. In the U.K., for instance, Debenhams plc, a department store chain with 200 stores, including 40 outside of its home country, has offered click and collect since 2010, says Dasha Melyushkina, head of international e-commerce. The offering combines the strengths of web and store retail venues by taking advantage of many locations and, in the U.K. in particular, a finite geography that ensures most shoppers needn’t travel far to pick up a purchase.

In October 2014 the merchant extended its deadline for orders qualifying for next-day delivery to 9 p.m. the night before from 5 p.m. previously and as of May 2016 had rolled out the program to 150 of its 160 stores in Great Britain and Ireland. “It’s been very good to us and customers are responding,” Melyushkina says. Debenhams, No. 33 in the Internet Retailer’s 2016 Europe 500, also has franchise stores in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia, owns six Magasin du Nord department stores in Denmark, and delivers products to 66 countries.

Debenhams and other web retailers in Europe are refining their websites and services to meet shopper preferences and cope with the competitive heat from Amazon.com Inc., No. 1 in the 2016 Europe 500, whose reach stretched across the Atlantic Ocean in 2010. No retailers can match Amazon’s network of 29 fulfillment facilities in seven European countries, and the merchant announced in March 2016 it would open two more U.K. fulfillment centers in 2016, bringing its total there to 12. Amazon continues to invest in European markets and says it has spent 4.6 billion pounds ($6.71 billion) in the U.K. alone since it began operations there in 2010.

Debenhams has three distribution centers for stores in the U.K. and two serving e-commerce orders. The merchant relies on its own fleet of delivery trucks in the U.K. and on Hermes, a German logistics company, for deliveries to customers in European countries outside England. But like retailers in the U.S., Debenhams relies on services like click and collect and its related “endless aisle” program that provides many more products online than its stores to compete with Amazon and other larger retailers.

For more information on Internet Retailer’s new report on European e-commerce and the new Internet Retailer 2016 Europe 500, available in database format, click here.