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Douglas,

You said you were looking for a good news business story. Here's a big one.

Last year, eCommerce (trading online) just in the UK turned over around £160 billion and grew at around 30%. This rate of growth is continuing. Our company (INDEZ, Skypark, Glasgow) looks after 16 large eCommerce sites. Over the past 12 months they have grown at over 100% average. The media thought that Amazon (whose turnover grew 18% and profits grew 24%) was something special and doing well. In fact it probably lost market share. ASOS (that grew turnover at over 100%) was probably ahead of the curve.

Here in Glasgow we launched a site called www.littlekidsbedrooms.com last December. Today it turns over four figures daily and over 20% of sales to the US - i.e. people in California buying duvet covers from a Glasgow company. A much bigger Glasgow enterprise we built is toolstop. They are now an eight-figure turnover pure online business; they even sell Bosch drills to Germans.

While we are doing our best producing a long string of rapidly growing online businesses, Scotland itself is not doing too well. The Hitwise online retail list (like the footsie 100 on e-tailers)does not have a single Scottish company in the top 100 (by ratio we should have 10%) this probably means that we in Scotland are probably running a large balance of trade defecit in eCommerce with the rest of the UK. But are we? We don't know. I asked the UK Office of National Statistics (who provided the stats I started with) if they had figures for Scotland. They told me they "do not do regional breakdowns"! Nobody in Scotland has the stats. If you ask why is this the problem we are not aware of any public sector strategy or plan for eCommerce (which by our Government figures is larger than our balance of trade defecit in oil and gas) and the public sector does not even support it. We understand that Scottish Enterprise formally does not support retail with the main reason being "displacement".

Bottom line, eCommerce is massive and it is booming and generally ignored by the media. People buy stuff online because they quickly and easily find excellent products at the best price. We talk about the high street in decline. Absolutely. The only point is that whilst the media go on about this being because of the recession, they miss the main story which is that the underlying cause is eCommerce which is now deeply and fundamentally changing the nature of our town and cities.

The numbers itself suggest that this is the biggest business story of the moment - so why do the media largely ignore it?

If ´óÏó´«Ã½ Scotland was serious about business coverage it wouldn't put its only business programme out at 10am on a Sunday morning. And, frankly, it would also serve up a bit more than a rather superficial blog which is no more than a slim facsimile of coverage from across the rest of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ and other media (i.e. it doesn't tell us anything new, although it does mangle the English language quite impressively).

The ´óÏó´«Ã½ appears to believe that the economic downturn is all about house-prices and retail sales, which may tell us more about the pre-occupations of well paid, insulated ´óÏó´«Ã½ journalists rather than anything else.