Even against modest forecasts, the January trading statement season was miserable.

A common theme was that, to be a winner, you needed to be a supermarket or, better still, a retailer with genuine internet flair.

Since online retailing has been more than a decade in development, it is unsurprising that those who have failed to adapt are now struggling. Virtually all the growth in non-food retail sales since 2001 has gone either to the grocers or online.

Most has gone online and e-tail now accounts for an estimated 15 per cent of non-food sales – too big a chunk for anyone other than a niche business to ignore.

The failure of most retailers to embrace the opportunities of the internet is demonstrated by a visit to their stores and web sites. In theory, the experiences should be complementary. They hardly ever are.

A retailer’s web site should not be viewed as just another outlet, but as a store extension for every branch in the chain. Distribution should not be an afterthought, but an integrated part of the retail offer.

Take ceramic tiles, a difficult product to display in a space-constrained store. The variety, colour and size permutations are vast. Equally, they are heavy and difficult for consumers to carry away. On the other hand, they are the type of product that shoppers want to see and feel before they buy. You would have thought this means they are tailor-made for combined in-store/internet merchandising, backed up by a good delivery service.

So let’s try UK market leader B&Q. Imagine you want to buy enough tiles for a standard bathroom, including wall, floor and co-ordinating feature tiles. You want to do some research first, so you visit its web site.

Last time I checked, there was not a single tile online. Of 1,313 “flooring products” catalogued by B&Q, 159 could be bought online, but this miserable 12 per cent did not include a single tile. Try in stores and choice is extremely limited by stock availability.

Leading UK specialist Topps Tiles does not do much better. While it displays 231 tile varieties online, it rather annoyingly boasts this is “just a small selection of our huge range available”.

Excuse me. If I wanted a Victorian peep show I would go to one. Surely one person in the organisation could upload the present range online? And what exactly is the problem in adding an online ordering facility?

In short, UK customers who visit the leading DIY retailer and leading tile specialist cannot buy a single tile online. By comparison, Lowes in the US has a deliverable range of 514 options.

Tiles are an illustrative rather than exceptional product. The central reason why UK non-food retailers are finding trading conditions quite so tough is down to internal failings rather than squalls in the financial markets.