Two out of five Irish business executives believe their e-commerce activities are not sufficiently prepared for the introduction of the euro, a pan-European study has found. It also found 79 per cent would increase spending on e-commerce by an average of 15 per cent this year despite the economic slowdown.

The Unexpected eEurope study, prepared by Accenture during June and July this year, concluded e-commerce was thriving in Europe despite economic woes.

Although the results were correlated before the September 11th attacks in the US, Mr Seamus Mulconry, strategy manager at Accenture, said this probably did not make a "fundamental difference" to the results, though it may have accelerated an existing downward trend.

Mr Sean Shine, partner in Accenture, said many small firms were leaving it to the last minute to switch their e-commerce processes from the pound to the euro."It's very much like the year 2000 issue again when, coming up to the deadline, many SMEs still had a lot of work to be done," he said.

The results show that 42 per cent of Irish executives said their e-commerce activities were not sufficiently prepared, while the figure for all of Europe was 36 per cent. In contrast, the Republic scored the highest of all 25 states surveyed in the Government's role as an exemplar of e-commerce.

Some 65 per cent of Irish executives said the Government was a good role model for the adoption of e-commerce compared to 50 per cent of executives in the US, placed second.

Mr Shine said this was illustrated by the strong uptake in the Revenue Online site which had taken in almost €1.5 billion (£1.18 billion) in taxes in its first year of operation.