Despite the gloom and doom surrounding the retail industry, the MD of John Lewis thinks the answer is "bricks and clicks" - a strong web presence supporting a good physical stores network.

Andy Street told the Telegraph the retailer's fastest growing area is its "pick and collect" initiative, allowing customers to order online and pick up products in the shops.

"Over the autumn we have been about 75pc up year- on-year on that so it's a huge change in how people want to transact," says Mr Street.

"To do that well you need a brilliant website and the convenience of shops. It's all about behaviour; how our customers want to behave and what we have got to do is make it easy for them to behave in the way that we want.

"About 50pc of our online transactions involve research in the shops and vice-versa. So it is not one channel or the other; it is the two hand in glove and this is why we have an advantage." he added.

Read the full interview from the Telegraph.

John Lewis's website was one of those tested in the Sitemorse UK Retail Top 500 survey earlier this month and it's fair to say did not score highly.

But we agree with Andy Street's analysis of how important the online component of selling has become.

Recent research showed around a quarter of users will drop out of an online sale because of technical issues. And 82% of consumers said that if a business' website performed badly it would dissuade them from buying goods from that organisation on the web - or even in- store.

Yet recent Sitemorse benchmarks show many online retailers either do not know, or choose to ignore this, with some of the best-known high street names performing very badly on quality issues.