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Bumper Online Sales On Black Friday

Bumper Online Sales On Black Friday

Retail giant Amazon has reported record figures as shoppers abandoned the high street and went online in search of bargains on Black Friday.

Amazon says Black Friday 2015 was its biggest sales day ever in the UK with more than 7.4 million items ordered - a rate of 86 items a second.

It beat the figure set last year when more than 5.5 million items were sold at a rate of about 64 per second.

Christopher North, managing director of Amazon.co.uk, said: "For the second year straight, customers in the UK have blown us away with their response."

Online retailer very.co.uk also reported bumper sales, saying more than half a million users visited its site by 9am, having opened for business midnight.

Currys PC World also reported its biggest-ever start to Black Friday with eight sales per second and 100 large screen TVs selling per minute online.

However, a number of websites including those of John Lewis and Argos struggled to cope with the demand.

One frustrated Argos customer tweeted: "10 min queue online, then it told me 8 days for delivery with no option for 24 hour, and then it crashed."

Argos tweeted back: "Order confirmations are taking longer than normal. Please sit tight, confirmation will be with you shortly."

Problems were also reported on the websites of Tesco, fashion hub Boohoo.com, Boots, River Island and Debenhams.

Before the hitches retail analyst Experian-IMRG predicted Black Friday online spending would hit a record £1.07bn, a 32% increase on last year's £810m.

As a result of the surge in online sales experts have forecast a total four-day spend of £3.2bn from Black Friday to Cyber Monday.

With so many people shopping online, there was no repeat of the unseemly scuffles witnessed in high street stores last year as customers fought over big-ticket items.

It was a similar in the US, although a number of brawls were reported at malls in Kentucky and Texas, where one shopper at a branch of Walmart took a swing at a police officer.