Amazon UK has reported its busiest shopping day as consumers took to the internet on Cyber Monday.
The internet retailer said orders came in at a rate of 47 items a second, racking up 4.1m sales during the day and peaking at 9.22pm.
It beat the previous record of 4m sales that had been set only three days before on "Black Friday" – the US-imported retail gimmick where stores offer a day of heavy discounting to kickstart the festive shopping season.
"Black Friday really captured the imagination of customers as shown by the fact that we had our busiest day to date and reached one-day sales of over 4m items for the very first time in our history," said Christopher North, managing director of Amazon.co.uk.
"Customers were then out in force again yesterday, shopping for Christmas presents and generating our busiest day of sales ever."
Amazon, which has faced accusations that its working conditions could cause mental and physical illness, also reported that it had sold 1m items of clothes and shoes last week, its largest-ever fashion sales.
Tesco said visits to its website were up 114% on Monday compared with a typical Monday, while John Lewis was boosted by a 300% jump in its traffic last Friday.
But thousands of consumers were left frustrated after a technical glitch at the Royal Bank of Scotland left them unable to use their debit cards for three hours on Monday evening.
The bank apologised on Tuesday after customers at RBS, Natwest and Ulster Bank saw their cards declined on one of the busiest shopping days of the year.
Amazon's bumper sales figures underline how online retail is changing the way people shop at Christmas. Visa Europe had forecast that this year's Cyber Monday would see UK online shoppers spend £450m.
More than a quarter of all Christmas spending is done online compared with just 1% three years ago, according to the industry association for e-retail IMRG. Online shopping is already up 10% this year compared with 2012, according to Barclaycard, which processes nearly half of all card transactions in the UK.
