Shoppers hunting Black Friday bargains sparked a surge in online sales during the small hours but left high street stores looking deserted compared with the frantic scramble of previous years.
Retailers’ most eagerly awaited day of the year has increasingly been moving on to the web and the trend showed no signs of abating as online stores started racking up sales from midnight.
John Rogers, the new chief executive officer of Argos, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme there had been 500,000 visits to the retailer’s website in the first hour of online trading between midnight and 1pm – up 50% on last year.
He said he expected traffic to peak between 7am and 10am as people shop on their mobile phones on their way to work.
Rogers predicted that Argos would take 70% or more of its orders onlinetoday compared with 50% during normal trading, and that the company was better prepared for Black Friday than last year after rigorously testing its systems.
Online retailers have this year taken extra precautions to prevent online meltdown and overloaded websites crashing.
Currys PC World’s Black Friday 2016 deals webpage suffered problems just after midnight, according to tweets from furious “early bird” shoppers. The first UK bargain-hunters reported frustratingly slow loading times and pages timing out.
“Currys how is this happening?” one user tweeted. Another posted: “bit of a joke you being currys pcworld and your website crashing. Remind me never to go to you for a PC!”
A spokeswoman said: “Currys PC World’s website experienced a few issues for a short period of 15 minutes just after midnight. The majority of customers were still able to access the site and place orders but we understand that some shoppers had problems loading the pages.
“This was quickly rectified and we have had no further reported issues. We’ve already seen over half a million visitors to the site between midnight and 6am this morning (with orders up 40% for the same period last year) with the Google Chromecast, Samsung Galaxy Tablets and JVC 32in TVs being the most popular items for shoppers.”
While online retailers were busy, stores were off to a slow start. At the Tesco Extra in Streatham, south London, there were only 11 people in the queue when the supermarket opened at 5am – barely outnumbering the security guards.
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