The Irish Gift House Celebrates Our 30,000th Order!

I guess that Kerry and I were relatively late in embracing e-commerce at The Irish Gift House as we didn't launce theirishgifthouse.com until 2005.  We had a thriving "brick and mortar" retail business in place and we were happy taking orders by phone and by mail.  We didn't know what was good for us!

What we first thought was that our customers might want to see what Irish gifts and Celtic jewelry we offered and would next take a drive to our store.   We think that is actually how the internet first worked; at least it did for us.  For example, a customer would call and ask if we had Claddagh rings.  We would say, "We had many Claddagh rings, and they are all made in Ireland."  The next question might be to describe what some of our Claddagh rings look like.  That can be a little difficult over the phone, so by directing the customer to our website (if they had access, remember not everyone did in 2005) they could take a gander and would then typically visit our store.

As the years past and as the internet expanded an interesting phenomenon occurred; the customer would skip visiting our store and would simply make the purchase from our site!   We started to think that this internet might catch on and kept adding more and more Irish goods to our site including Celtic crosses and Celtic wedding bands.  In fact over the years we have added over 15,000 Irish gifts to theirishgifthouse.com, but through attrition, we currently have just over 9,000 items.

Early on we often went days or weeks at a time without an order; while today we wonder if our site is up if we didn't take an order in the last hour.  Now during the Christmas season we will often take over 100 orders in a day; that keeps the two of us hopping!  There have been a couple of times that we even considered temporarily taking our site off line so we could catch our breath.

Thinking of Christmas, it was Irish Christmas ornaments and Irish Santa decorations that were some of our earliest sales.  We still ship a lot of them today, but our number one categories are Irish jewelry and Celtic jewelry.  We think that there was once apprehension in buying jewelry from a "stranger".  Today the apprehension has been replace with the confidence of dealing with a reputable merchant, even if it is electronically.       

Kerry and I have been, and continue to be grateful to the thousands of customers who have trusted us over the years.  We look forward to hearing from you soon!