33% of revenue in Irish ecommerce comes from abroad

In Ireland, a statistics goes around that around 75% of the money consumers in Ireland spend online goes to overseas companies. This may well be the case, but the opposite figure is also interesting. On average, 33 percent of revenue from Irish ecommerce sites comes from outside the country.

Actually, the average revealed by digital agency Wolfgang Digital is 43 percent, but this also included the travel industry, which of course skews the numbers because almost three quarters of their revenue is generated internationally.

25% has majority of revenue coming from abroad
So, an average of 33 percent of revenue in the Irish ecommerce industry comes from international customers, Irish Times writes. The data from Wolfgang Digital even reveals that one in four retail companies surveyed collect the majority of their online turnover from international customers.

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The high performers in Wolfgang’s sample, which have a combined revenue of more than 80 million euros, tended to have been trading internationally for more than three years, so it seems that experience counts in this case.

No translating for other markets
An interesting find is that most of the high-performing retail sites had not translated their websites for other markets. No surprise, you might say. Irish websites as well as a lot of international markets are in English, but according to the agency, most of these sites were making sales in multiple countries where English is not the first language.

Irish online retailers generating revenue outside the country borders, it doesn’t happen by chance. “Search, and in particular paid search advertising, was the most important source of traffic and revenue in export markets for both new entrants and those with a long-established presence”, the Irish news website says.

According to Wolfgang Digital’s founder and CEO Alan Coleman this is the flipside of the “75% of money spent online goes abroad” figure. “Customers in far bigger export markets are ready to spend money with Irish businesses bold enough to enter them.”