Two-Thirds of Irish Websites Show Prices. Under a Third Take an Order

The CSO's 2025 enterprise survey measured what Irish business websites actually do. 66.5% published information about goods, services or prices. 28.6% offered online ordering, reservation or booking. 21.9% advertised jobs. 9.7% had a chat service for customer support. 7.4% let a customer track an order.

Read those together and a specific picture emerges. The typical Irish business website is a brochure with a phone number. It can describe the offer. It cannot complete a transaction, and in most cases it cannot even take the next commitment — a booked slot, a configured quote, a tracked order.

That gap has a direct cost, and it is not the lost online sale. It is the manual labour required to convert every enquiry. Someone reads the email, checks availability, replies with a price, waits, follows up, re-checks, confirms. On CSO earnings data, average hourly earnings in Ireland reached €31.22 in Q4 2025. A process consuming forty minutes of staff time per enquiry costs roughly €21 in labour every time, before anything is sold.

The sector breakdown shows how uneven this is: 41.7% of Services enterprises conducted sales by internet in 2025, against 38.8% in Manufacturing and 10.1% in Construction. Construction and specialist trades are almost entirely dependent on manual quoting — which is defensible when work is genuinely bespoke, and expensive when 60% of enquiries follow three predictable patterns.

The upgrade is rarely full e-commerce. For most B2B firms the highest-return change is a structured enquiry path: a short qualifying flow that captures the four facts your team always has to ask for, routes the record straight into the CRM, and returns either an instant indicative price or a booked call. That converts an unstructured inbox into a pipeline you can measure.

Test your own site against the CSO list. Can a serious buyer commit to anything at 9pm on a Sunday without a member of your staff being involved? If the answer is no, you are in the 71.4% — and the cost is being paid quietly in salary rather than visibly in lost sales.