CD Wow! awards lucrative deal to Irish firm


12 Mar 2007

Irish online payments processing firm Realex Payments has landed a lucrative three-year deal to process transactions for popular CD and DVD e-commerce player CD Wow!.

Dublin-based Realex processes in excess of €3.5bn a year worth of payments for international online retailers and corporate players such as Aer Lingus, Aer Arann, Quinn Direct, Vodafone, Party Poker, Motortax.ie, BT, Direct Ski and VHI.

Hong Kong-based CD Wow! is a global e-commerce vendor selling hundreds of thousands of DVD and CD titles across nine locally run domains worldwide and has clients from all corners of the globe, including the Cayman Islands, Guatemala and Trinidad & Tobago.

Realex founder Colm Lyon said the deal demonstrates how technology has made the world a smaller place, when you consider you can buy a DVD from the Norwegian CD Wow! site, have the payment processed by Realex in Ireland and have the DVD shipped from Hong Kong.

“For Realex Payments to be selected as the online payment processor for the hugely successful CD WOW! site, is an amazing achievement and shows our ongoing commitment to achieving huge success in this competitive environment,” Lyon, who was previously a senior IT executive at Ulster Bank, said.

Both CD Wow! and Realex were established in 2000 and have been growing strongly ever since.

Realex has a staff of 35 and has over 1,800 clients while CD Wow! has achieved an annual growth rate of 35pc in the last 12 months and has signed 600,000 new customers.

CD and DVD sales are amongst the most popular items bought on the internet today and recent estimates suggest some 100 million European online shoppers will spend a total of €100bn on internet purchases.

Lyon believes that online retail sales will double over the next five years. In the month of January alone the company processed the same volume of transactions as it had processed during the first three years of being in business.

By John Kennedy