The internet doesn’t kill retailers, retailers do.

Consumers who like the internet like stores too; as any multichannel retailer with a half decent CRM system will already know.

Yet the internet gets something of a bad press whenever retail businesses fail, or retailers announce that they need less stores to run their business than they once did.

The latest round of administrations and store portfolio reduction stories has once again highlighted the growth of the internet and ecommerce. And it is surely the case that if you were setting up a specialist retailer today you would decide the optimum number of stores is less than it might have been 10 years ago, as a decent percentage of your sales will be generated online.

However, thinking of the recent specialist success stories, many have chosen stores as an important part of their market presence. Take Republic, only last week its chief executive said it remains committed to opening stores; though not quite as many as it thought it might a few years ago. The internet is giving people a reason to go to its stores – 10% of its store sales are from click and collect.

And looking back to the aftermath of the collapse of Woolworths, analysis of where its sales were redistributed in the year after it failed showed a strong bias towards stores. Nevermind Amazon making the Woolworths proposition obsolete, actually Asda and Tesco picked up nearly £150m of its sales, and the pound stores a further £60m. According to Verdict, only £17m in sales were mopped up by Amazon.

The internet does not ruin retail businesses. Retailers who do not provide products and experiences that their customers are willing to pay for, and those who make retail property uncompetitively expensive as a channel, it is they who are to blame.