Irish Online Shopping Habits Over The Festive Period

No sooner have we taken down the decorations and thrown out the Christmas tree, than we’re looking to the year ahead. But if you spent the festive period checking out domain names Ireland or trying to find the right domain registration for your business, you’ll be pleased to know, it wasn’t in vain!

Open online for business
Research shows that online shopping continues to grow at a pace, with half of all shoppers preferring to head online once more this festive season.

In this digital era, businesses of all kind need a digital presence to complete with high-street shops and huge online competitors. Failure to keep up, may be detrimental to their long-term profitability.

And, it all starts with a domain name, particularly an IE domain name. This is especially true if SMEs want to stand out with a unique and exclusive domain name.

The good news is that it’s easy to set up a website, and requires little technical know-how. Simply just check a domain name for availability and take it from there. There’s even web hosting options, to make it easy to manage all in one place.

The billion-price tag
A whopping €4.65bn is the price tag put on Irish shopping over the Christmas period, with most shoppers choosing to buy on foreign websites. Some might say that there has never been a better time to wave the Irish flag and remind customers that they can buy local too, even online.

There are plenty of great IE domains available to snap up. Companies can incentivise customers by offering free delivery or speedy delivery, to compete with international charges and the time they take to deliver.

The opportunity is sizeable too. The average Irish household was predicted to spend a huge €2,690 in the month of December alone, according to insight from Retail Ireland.

Of course, November has become a huge e-commerce opportunity as well, thanks to Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This has been wholly embraced by Ireland, with sales up by 653% in November compared to the monthly average.

The changing face of the high street
When once it was all about Dunnes and Penneys on the high street, today it’s about Amazon and Google. In fact, 70% of shoppers admitted that Amazon had changed the way they shop.

But as we all know, this is a trend that’s only set to grow and indeed evolve. A recent report by PWC valued Ireland’s e-commerce industry at €14.1 billion by 2021. It found that a quarter of respondents shopped online weekly, and a third (30%) expect to use their mobile phones as their main shopping tool in the future.

It really proves that domain registration should be top of mind, if you don’t already have a company website now is the time!

The cost of technology
The good news for small business’ is that it’s neither difficult, nor expensive to keep up with consumer demands.

The cost to register a domain is as low as €4.99 with Lets Host, while shared hosting provides an affordable option for those on economical budgets.

While apps can be more expensive to invest in, as long as your website is fully optimised for mobile devices, customers should have no problem utilising their smartphones to spend away on your site.

So, here’s to a happy and profitable 2019!

If you own a small business and don’t have an ie domain name or web hosting, then visit LetsHost.ie for a selection of affordable solutions for your enterprise.