It’d be nice to see more/better Irish on line retailers though. It sickening getting hammered on sterling when buying from Amazon.

Sadly Irish retailers still underestimate on-line. Out of date stock inventory, prices, product descriptions and photos…

i nearly always shop online, i can browsw shops, compere prices and check item i want, then check reviews on it.first i always look for irish sites to buy from, but nearly always find this lacking and end up buying from uk sites.
as iv said many times ireland retail and wholesale businesses better wake up ONLINE SHOPPING IS BIG and is also a big market. i could well believe irish consumers spending 2.4 million online, but on irish sites, i wonder!

Some Irish retailers are still of the rip-off mentality… In the last few weeks I’ve bought 3 items (which for my job are a must have) On-line… I did try to shop around here, however, Ebay came in with the best deal for the very same equipment..Irish retailers total cost was around €230… From EBay inc shipping and import taxes €110… Massive saving and saved the grief of visiting a shop where you also have to listen to some shop assistant blabber on to her mate about how good her night was and how pissed she got.!!

Any stats on which types of cards are being used ?

Setting up online in Ireland is also made difficult by rather messy and expensive banking systems. Getting setup to accept cards online here is really expensive which drives a lot of business abroad.

It’s also extremely expensive to ship from Ireland to other markets due to high postal and courier prices. Again, this makes it hard to setup online here. That’s probably being driven up by things like illogical addresses, no post codes making it difficult for logistics companies to find people etc etc as well as just small market and distance.

We tend to only focus on broadband as a barrier to entry that needs to be addressed. However, there are quite a few other major hurdles for Irish etailers that aren’t being addressed!

It needs a serious government effort to iron out these problems. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be leading Europe in terms of online retail.

I almost always send my purchases to the parcelmotel for collection, thus taking benefit of the free delivery within UK option.
It costs about €3

It would be interesting to know how much was spent on websites outside of ireland against how much Irish companies were making out of Internet shopping. I find I’m supporting more small Irish businesses through Facebook pages etc – it’s a different way of shopping “locally”.

I think the glib quote “there’s no recession on the Internet” is unfair – Internet purchasing is more to do with busy lives and convenient ways to shop and more often than not it’s a way of shopping around for cheaper deals because we have less money to spend so need to be wiser with how we spend it. Unfortunately it does mean that a lot of money ends up outside the country because prices remain high in ireland comparatively.

We are so broke 2.4 million can afford broadband and then spend 140euro a month. Someone telling porkies.