As I continue to search for Christmas presents online, I have to admit I still get quite frustrated with Irish retailers online.
Over the weekend I search for an online jewelry store to purchase a gift for my mother. Instantly I was bombarded with jewelry websites that I can only say have been “left behind” in terms of the Internet. It was extremely difficult to find any decent Irish jewelry shop where searching.
I did find one that looked like it did everything I was looking for – the famous House of Ireland store. Everything looked good for a while as I browsed through the site, there was plenty of choice unlike other sites I had visited. One thing stroke me though, the prices were displayed in US Dollars by default. As their shop in Dublin is hugely targeted at the US tourists, I thought, ah no big deal, I’ll just choose Euros from the drop down menu.
After doing this, I noticed the price difference was staggering. A Waterford Crystal vase was $260, but when converted to euro it was a huge €240. With today’s exchange rate, it should have been in the €200-205 price bracket. I assume the difference in price is because they have displayed the dollar price minus the VAT and when you change to euros, it instantly adds the VAT price on. This is all well and good if they didn’t display dollar prices by default.
From a technical point of view, there is quite a lot they can do to prevent this sort of confusion for the customer. IP location software is widely available on the Internet, it would have taken a programmer a few hours to display the currency based on the customers location. Not 100% reliable I know, but in most cases would work pretty well.
The site itself is built in some flavour of either osCommerce or Zen Cart. Both of these packages have ready build modules to handle situations like this.
Better still, a simple notification that the dollar price didn’t include VAT would also prevent people from getting suspicious in the difference in price.
All in all – it looks like there really are no decent Irish Jewelry stores online. If you know of one, please let me know!
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#1 by Mark Galligan, CEO House of Ireland at December 9th, 2008
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Tom-thanks for mentioning the House of Ireland site.You have highlighted a technical issue that we should look into regarding IP recognition. Just to clarify a few points which may be helpful to your readers – you are correct in that a large part of our traffic comes from the US, so the default currency is in dollars.As you have seen it is simple to change the currency to Euros or Sterling. We may look at IP recognition and its a fair point and this may add value to the site, so we will put this on our To Do list for January. In practice we have found that our customers want to see the final price they will pay: so our US customers see the US dollar price based on the original supplier’s (usually Irish) price – this price is without VAT, however if it were shipped to anywhere in the EU we would be obliged to add VAT and this functionality is built into the final stage of checkout. Prices shown in euros include VAT – the assumption is that those buying in Euros are mainly delivering their goods in the EU and need to see the final price inclusive of VAT. We did try showing both prices exclusive and inclusive of VAT under the product description but this looks very sloppy and if you look at other EU retailerss best practice sites they display prices inclusive of VAT just as we do. Where the items are being shipped outside of the EU, the VAT is removed from the euro or sterling price at final stage of checkout. Our rate of exchange from Euro to Sterling and Dollar is changed on a daily basis.
HouseofIreland.com is one of the most successful e-commerce sites coming out of Ireland with over 140,000 unique visitiors each year. Many of the customers are those who have shopped in our retail stores in Nassau St and Dublin Airport and return frequently to make purchases on our website.We have the biggest collection of Irish and European luxury giftware and incidentally intend adding considerably to the jewellery section which has been very successful for us.
We are continually trying to improve our internet performance and we do appreciate users’ feedback to help make the shopping experience a better one.
Finally, there are some great Christmas novelty gift items that we can’t show on our site due to the limited supply -so hopefully some of your readers have the time to come into our House of Ireland branch on Nassau & Dawson St over the coming days. Look forward to welcoming everyone
Mark Galligan
p.s. feel free to make any further comments on the functionality of the site – we welcome this
#2 by Tom Doyle at December 10th, 2008
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Hi Mark,
Thanks for stopping by and leaving your comments.
Unfortunately I can’t agree with your points and I’ll explain why.
1. Currency
In this case, you kind of double back on what you are saying.
I have to agree with a further point where you talk about the VAT and that people want to see the full price. That is true. However, it’s not safe to assume that people will actually change the currency. If they do, as my article states, it looks very dodgy to see the price difference. If I didn’t know that Americans don’t have to pay the VAT, I would feel very ripped off and go elsewhere straight away.
Also, with the current weakness of Sterling against Euro, I would be constantly checking between currencies to see if I could get a better deal with one.
2. IP recognition
This was only one suggestion for the current scenario – I don’t believe this is sufficient in the long, but more of a stop gap solution. In reality, there are much better ways of handling this scenario.
3. VAT
As I said above, I agree completely that customers want to see the full price. I didn’t suggest a non VAT inclusive price. What I suggested was a VAT inclusive price, with a note underneath stating the VAT amount.
I know from working with osCommerce/ZenCart that this isn’t easily done and would take quite a bit of work. THe method you are talking about is possible however and I imagine thats why you are discussing it.
4. Assumptions
Making assumptions is really bad. Be honest with yourself, with the day to day running of your business, you don’t work on assumptions. You work on fact, this works, this doesn’t. The web is no different, there are plenty of statistics, free analytics packages etc out there to help you establish the shopping habits of people on the Internet.
Overall it looks like you are being dictated by limits of the software you use. You wouldn’t be the only Irish retailer to use this free software, but it really should only be used to a stage. If you feel your website is successful as it is (which I’ll come back to) then why not bring it to the next level now and work on improving conversions by improving usability and using other techniques to entice people to buy?
For this you will need to build a bespoke system which will be time consuming, but it will be worth it in the end – that’s for sure.
Finally, to get back to your suggestion that your website is “one of the most successful e-commerce sites coming out of Ireland”. I’d beg to differ on that one.
Gauging a websites success can not be based on the level of traffic. I have worked with IRISH clients in the past that have had a much higher level of traffic, with a very low conversion rate. We obviously helped improve this.
So without knowing your conversion rate, it’s hard to establish how successful you actually are. I could pick one of our clients from the top of my head who I would imagine has a much better conversion rate than your site with about 3 thirds the amount of traffic you have.
At the end of the day if you feel your website is so successful, why not the spend the money to get it right? You could see a drastic increase in conversions by changing the process and making it more user friendly. You won’t do this with the current software you use as mentioned above.
This is nothing personal by the way Mark, your site is like a LOT of Irish retailers. It’s certainly one of the best Irish jewelry sites on the web, however you haven’t got much competition there.
Tom
#3 by Tom Doyle at December 10th, 2008
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BTW: I haven’t even stepped back and taken a look at online marketing at all here, this was a very simple overview of what I feel your site isn’t doing.
#4 by Alice Bennett at January 12th, 2012
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I’m really wondering if it’s really safe to buy jewelries online? I mean, you don’t get to see the jewelry yourself, just a picture of it. How could you be sure the site isn’t a scam or something like that?
Alice Bennett