Ireland

Retailers in Ireland are migrating online as the outbreak of the coronavirus has fueled ecommerce in the Western European country. Online sales are now a significant part of the retail offering for thousands of Irish companies.

Ecommerce platform provider xSellco, which operates Repricer.com, has acquired Lucid Interactive, the company behind RepricerExpress. As a result, an enhanced version of Repricer.com has been launched today.

Czech online optician Lentiamo is expanding in Europe again. The ecommerce company has now launched its online store in Ireland. From now on, Irish shoppers can order contacts, spectacles and sunglasses in the online Lentiamo shop.

Swappie, which sells refurbished iPhones online, is expanding across Europe. Today, the Finnish startup launched its online store in Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland, and Portugal.

Buymie, a grocery delivery start-up from Ireland, has signed a multi-year partnership agreement with Lidl Ireland. The two companies have been working together since 2019. Buymie also raised 2.2 million euros in funding.

Google has acquired Pointy, a startup that helps physical retailers with showcasing their products online. Pointy has been a partner of Google for years, for the search engine's "See what's in store" section that is shown on business profiles on Google search.

An Post has opened its new Dublin Parcel Hub, a 15 million euros investment in automated parcel processing. The logistics center is 50,000 square meters big and should significantly increase An Post's parcel processing capacity.

Just 69 percent of small and medium-sized enterprises in Ireland have a website. And only 32 percent of these online companies sell products or services online. By not selling online, SMEs are losing their share of the Ireland's €12.3 billion ecommerce market.

Ecommerce in Ireland is expected to be worth 2.2 billion euros at the end of 2019. The country's online retail industry is set to increase by 12.9 percent this year, thanks to product differentiation, a growth in the mobile market and online retailers investing in their websites.

Supermarket chain Lidl has extended its online grocery shopping and home delivery service in Ireland. The service, operated by grocery delivery startup Buymie, was already active in Dublin and now extends into the commuter counties surrounding the capital.

Consumers in Ireland are rapidly increasing their usage of card payments. At the same time, paying with cash is getting less popular. The fast growth in popularity of card payments goes hand in hand with a significant increase in online shopping in the past year.

An Post, the state-owned postal company of Ireland, has reported a jump in revenue last year. The company's sales increased by almost 7 percent to 897 million euros. Although there was a predictable decline in its traditional mail business, the company's parcel volumes grew further.

Zalando is introducing shipping costs in the United Kingdom, Ireland and Spain. The German fashion giant has taken this step after an earlier test in Italy. Although Zalando claims there are no plans to further expand this measure, it seems like the end of an era.

Enterprise Ireland, a government organization aimed to let Irish enterprises grow, has opened a ecommerce fund to accelerate the online offering of retailers in Ireland and to increase their competitiveness. The 1.25 million euros fund opened last Wednesday and will remain open for six weeks.

Ecommerce platform provider xSellco has launched eDesk, a helpdesk that integrates with several ecommerce marketplaces, shopping carts and social channels, and should help online retailers to scale their customer support strategy.