Sit down and take a deep breath; this may come as a shock. But one part of the UK Government is better at online business than Tesco. I’ll say that again…Tesco is worse online than one arm of the UK Government. I know, sounds mad doesn’t it?

When you consider that Tesco generates £1.3 billion in sales via the Internet, this is some boast. But, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) is doing even better. On average, each day of the year, the DVLA is “outselling” Tesco by £600,000. Every day the DVLA takes around £4.2m in car tax completed online. According to Computer Weekly magazine, the DVLA completes around 273,500 car tax applications each week online.

So, why is the DVLA out-doing Tesco? Simple. It’s convenience. Finding your MOT certificate, your insurance documents, writing a cheque and then trudging to a Post Office only to queue for 20 minutes is not the most pleasing task in the world. Getting your car tax paid online takes less than five minutes.

Tesco also offers convenience, saving people the time and bother trudging around the vast cavern of their local “Extra” store to get the weekly basics. But with tangible goods that people want to touch and feel it is more difficult for retailers to sell the idea of online shopping.

The DVLA success story tells us one thing – if you produce intangible goods and services, such as consultancy, business services, publishing and so on, how can you make it more convenient for people to buy from you online? It is pure convenience that has driven the DVLA’s online success in little more than a year. Focus on providing convenience for your customers and you too could succeed online.

Children know much more about things than we give them credit for. You will find plenty of books advising parents on how to protect their children when they are using the Internet. But few of these books, or the articles you read on online protection of children, tell you it is the parents who need to know more than their children.

Earlier this week I spoke to a large group of children at the annual Quaker Summer Youth Event. My task was to help them be safe online. But it was apparent that they knew more than many adults about online safety. I asked them whether or not they would do something, like make their personal details available online. Who would be foolish enough to do that was the chorus of replies I received. Well adults would. That’s why identity fraud is so easy.

Adults like to think they know more than children, but often it is not the case. A few years back I visited one of the UK’s growing group of high tech schools and discovered that seven-year-olds there were dab hands at PowerPoint presentations, surfing the Internet and selecting appropriate information. As the head teacher told me the children were often teaching their parents.

Now it seems that Microsoft is bidding to help schools become even more high tech. But as the BBC TV programme Click points out all of the software and services that the children are getting used to are – hey presto – Microsoft ones.

Like banks that try to acquire students, they know that if you “get them young” you keep many of them for life. Building high tech schools is a fantastic idea, but allowing them to be put together by a single commercial supplier might not be a good suggestion. It will mean that the Internet of the future will be a Microsoft led one, rather than at the moment a Google led one. Ho hum, the battle goes on….!