Help our shops to win online custom

IT is worrying news indeed that Irish shoppers, as a proportion, buy more from online retailers based abroad than any other nationality in the world does. Last year, we spent more than €2.7billion on goods shipped from overseas by firms such as Amazon, and that sum is set only to rise.

It is easy to understand why this is the case. Ireland is a small country with no major internet retailer based here, but we are close to some of the world’s most developed online shopping markets, giving us a wide choice of products that can turn up on our doorsteps quickly and without fuss.

This money is leaving the country. It benefits no-one here – it creates no new jobs, it generates no VAT for the Irish Exchequer and, indeed, it poses a very real threat the future of traditional brick-and-mortar stores that actually do create employment and tax revenue.

When are we going to do something about this? When the spend hits €5billion? €10billion? PayPal, which commissioned the survey, forecasts the latter figure is what e-commerce will be worth in just two years but as things stand an increasing share of that money will disappear offshore. Almost one in five of us who shop online never buy from Irish websites, and 2.2million at least occasionally buy from another country.

The damage this will wreak on the economy is massive, and it is time to put in place a concerted plan to reverse the trend. Starting an online store is not as expensive as opening a physical shop – there is no need for massive inventory to be kept on the premises. Equally, there is massive room for expansion of e-commerce all across the country – it doesn’t make any difference if your package is posted in Dublin or Donegal, but the broadband infrastructure is not in place to bring online retail jobs to the regions.

This is a multifaceted problem that needs a multifaceted solution, and the Government must act before what already is damaging becomes catastrophically so.