By Alan Coleman on 19 Aug 2013
Online Shopping In Ireland Studies I read this article in the weekend edition of the Irish Times with interest. The study by Mintel values the online market in Ireland at €1.4 billion in 2012. This is a mere 35% of the €4 billion arrived at by Visa Europe for the same period. Visa reckons the market is growing at 39%, doubling every two and a bit years (to be precise), while Mintel reckons it will take five years for the market to double (putting annual growth rate at approx 15%). So why the vastly different market sizes & growth figures from the two studies? Different Data sets Here's the telling line in the IT article: "The reason for this is the report discounted purchases of services such as travel or event tickets, and also eliminated digital downloads and streaming, and private sales between consumers such as on eBay." Travel is actually the biggest category in terms of revenue in the Emerald Isle; we spend proportionally way more than our European counterparts on travel (couldn't be the weather could it?). Event tickets are another major beneficiary of online spend in Ireland, and then if you take out iTunes, Ebay & Netflix the Mintel study starts to look quite narrow in scope. Let's get the calculator out! Let's apply some inductive reasoning to see what we can learn from the two studies and find out where the real money is being made online in Ireland. The omitted categories in the Mintel Study represent €2.6 billion or 65% (€4b - €1.4b) of the market and are growing at 52% per year (100% growing at 39% pa, 35% growing at 15%pa, therefore the remaining 65% is growing at 52%pa. Conclusion The online verticals not covered in the Mintel study: Travel, Tickets, Digital Downloads & Ebay These represent the majority of the market, and are growing at more than 3 times the speed of the rest of the market! Thems the markets to be in folks. Alan
