Enterprise Ireland’s COVID-19 Online Retail Scheme offers €2m lifeline for Irish businesses

Enterprise Ireland’s new COVID-19 Online Retail Scheme is a €2m lifeline for Irish businesses in this anxious time, and digital agency Matrix Internet has just simplified the process with a helpful infographic for companies trying to navigate through the application.

Matrix is one of Enterprise Ireland’s approved consultants, and potential project partners on this scheme would join a long list of high-profile clients they’ve built up over 20 years, including Avoca, Newbridge Silverware, Butlers Chocolates, Irish Rail and GoCar.

If you’re an online retailer who’s feeling lost at sea after the initial wave of coronavirus panic, this scheme has maybe answered your emergency flare. All the information can be found on the official EI site here (there’s a lot of it), but if you follow this infographic you won’t be out of your depth.

Enterprise Ireland’s COVID-19 Online Retail Scheme

In this unprecedented move, EI has €2 million in grants to share among Irish companies to boost their online capabilities through eCommerce — to weather the storm and prove they’re still there for customers. According to research by the IE Domain Registry, less than a third of Irish SMEs with a website have eCommerce functionality, but it’s never been more important to drive customers online.

If you’ve stalled on enhancing your digital presence and performance because of budget worries, this new EI grant could cover up 80 per cent of the cost of a project, with a cap of €40,000.

Four-week window

EI opened the call for applications on Wednesday, April 29, with a deadline of 3pm on Wednesday, May 27. So the clock is already ticking on this tight four-week window, and many companies will already be navigating the applications process, aiming for a grant that will help steer their ship in the right direction.

A 2018 study by PayPal showed Irish people are the biggest international online shoppers worldwide, with 84% buying from overseas sites. With the right project and digital strategy, your company could divert some of these customers and entice them to shop at home.

Rewarding innovation

The Department of Business, Enterprise and Innovation (DBEI) has awarded €2m for this Enterprise Ireland grant, for Irish retail companies of 10 staff or more, with an existing web presence. ‘Innovation’ is the keyword here — judges won’t consider companies who simply want to buy off-the-shelf software or pay-per-click ads, and they’re not interested in upgrades that would be happening anyway.

Instead, Enterprise Ireland will be looking out for Irish-owned companies whose goal is generating jobs and growth through sales, with an end goal of international success.

If you’re applying, make sure your proposed project fits at least one of the following criteria:

Research

In-depth analysis of your company’s current online presence, target audience and brand. Find angles for differentiation and USPs.

Strategy Development

Following directly from the research, a suitable project may be to develop a written digital strategy and a roadmap for implementing well-researched findings.

Implementation

If you have a robust foundation of research and strategy development, convince judges that you have the potential and confidence to implement these strategies.

Can I work with an agency and get a grant from the COVID-19 Online Retail Scheme?

You can work with any agency, to propose a project in any of the above categories. The application will typically take 2-3 days to complete, but Matrix is offering free expert help and guidance as your project partner.

Contact them at ecommerce@matrixinternet.ie or visit their site to catch up on their previous work.

More about Irish Tech News and Business Showcase here

FYI the ROI for you is => Irish Tech News now gets over 1.5 million monthly views, and up to 900k monthly unique visitors, from over 160 countries. We have over 860,000 relevant followers on Twitter on our various accounts & were recently described as Ireland’s leading online tech news site and Ireland’s answer to TechCrunch, so we can offer you a good audience!

Since introducing desktop notifications a short time ago, which notify readers directly in their browser of new articles being published, over 30,000 people have now signed up to receive them ensuring they are instantly kept up to date on all our latest content. Desktop notifications offer a unique method of serving content directly to verified readers and bypass the issue of content getting lost in people’s crowded news feeds.

Drop us a line if you want to be featured, guest post, suggest a possible interview, or just let us know what you would like to see more of in our future articles. We’re always open to new and interesting suggestions for informative and different articles. Contact us, by email, twitter or whatever social media works for you and hopefully we can share your story too and reach our global audience.

Irish Tech News

If you would like to have your company featured in the Irish Tech News Business Showcase, get in contact with us at Simon@IrishTechNews.ie or on Twitter: @SimonCocking