There are few things where we can confidently say Britain is number one in the world. But we are number one in the world for online shopping.
No other country sells a bigger proportion of its products through the internet to its population. No other country has a population that has embraced online shopping like we have.
For grocery delivery we are far-and-away the biggest by share of sales and, according the the BRC, almost a quarter of our clothing shopping is now done online.
So when we saw how many online retailers David Cameron and his team has selected from well over 100 delegates from various companies and associations we were extremely disappointed. Because that number was 1.
Entrepreneur Ning Li at Made.com was privileged to get an invite. We counted a couple of other retailers on the list - Aurum, which owns jeweller Goldsmiths, Watches of Switzerland and Mappin & Webb; we also spotted Jack Wills co-founder Peter Williams - but neither of these are particularly big or significant online players.
No, there was only one. Made.com’s Li is clearly the kind of e-commerce entrepreneur this country needs to boast about. He set up furniture etailer MyFab.com in Paris seven years ago and then went on to found Made.com at the beginning of 2010.
But what about all our other ecommerce talent: Asos and Boohoo to name but two (who's accounts we exclusively revealed this morning). Ocado and Tesco - the most advanced food delivery firm and the biggest. Appliances online and the Hut.
Scott and Elaine Weavers-Wright and Fred Soneya from Kiddicare, now sold to Morrisons but who this year set up Haatch, a technology investment fund and start-up incubation centre in Stamford, Lincolnshire.
The signing of an agreement with Jack Ma to promote UK firms on Alibaba’s Tmall.com would have also been the perfect opportunity to show how important Cameron and Osborne saw the internet and the opportunities. More funding and facilities for technology start-ups, more investment in education.
Instead the list was full of old world firms and familiar names that we are sure would have just convinced many in China that the UK, as one Beijing newspaper provocatively suggested, is no longer ‘a big power in the eyes of the Chinese’ and only good for travel and study.
And will a commercial entity like Alibaba really promote UK firms anymore because it has signed an agreement to do so? Very unlikely unless it thinks its commercially sensible. You do not challenge Amazon, as Alibaba is doing, by doling out charity to the British.
So, as we said, a missed opportunity to put the UK one the world stage for something we are good at. Instead we end up looking like we are beholden to Alibaba for a gateway to China and not much else.
So who got all the publicity? Who got their brand name in every UK newspaper and mentioned thousands of times for the unintentionally comedy ‘selfie’ taken by Ma of himself and Cameron?
This was a poorly judged trip that could have raised the industry’s profile but instead leaves us looking like we turned up with a begging bowl.
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