The busiest shopping day in British retail hisotry took its toll of bargain-hunters yesterday as shoppers caught in the mêlée were taken to hospital with minor injuries.

Ambulance staff rushed to shopping centres as larger retailers reported sales peaks of £2,000 per minute at about 9.45am yesterday. Shops also faced £17 million of attempted fraud as criminals equipped with stolen credit card details joined 4.4 million legitimate online shoppers to buy reduced items over the internet.

Four shoppers needed urgent medical treatment at three separate branches of Next in the West Midlands after queues began to form in the early hours. Three people were taken to hospital and one woman was treated at the scene, West Midlands Ambulance Service reported. Two women collapsed at 5am and 7.30am at the Bullring shopping centre and were taken to hospital. Another woman, in her 20s, suffered a hand injury when she became trapped in a door on her way to the shelves at Fort shopping centre in Birmingham. A fourth woman, also in her 20s, was taken to hospital suffering from breathing difficulties.

High street sales peaked 45 minutes after the shops opened as customers finished browsing and arrived at the tills. John Lewis reported average sales of £1,000 per minute and double that figure during the morning peak. A spokesman said that sales had increased by up to 11 per cent on the previous year in some branches. Brent Cross Shopping Centre estimated that 150,000 shoppers passed through its doors yesterday, collectively spending up to £50,000 per hour.

The West End of London had an 8 per cent increase in Boxing Day shoppers compared with last year. The New West End Company, which represents shops in Oxford Street, Regent Street and Bond Street, said that there was a strong appetite for discounts on luxury items. Bond Street had a surge in shoppers of 13 per cent.

Online shopping has also grown, with an estimated £440 million spent through retail websites on Christmas Day, Boxing Day and yesterday. Retail Decisions, a fraud detection agency, reported that this represented a 41 per cent increase on last year.

The increase in shopping has been accompanied by £17 million of fraudulent activity in the past three days. An estimated 8,500 individuals or cells of fraudsters attempted to use stolen or cloned credit cards online every day. Carl Clump, the company’s chief executive, said that the £17 million of attempted fraud represented about 4 per cent of online retail activity. All but £1.9 million of these fraudulent actions were detected and blocked.

Christmas Day alone accounted for £84 million in online sales, according to figures compiled by the Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG), an industry body for retail websites. Research suggests that 4.4 million shoppers hit the internet and splashed out 269 per cent more than on December 25 last year.

They were attracted by online sales starting on December 25 by a number of retailers including Marks & Spencer, Comet and PC World. British shoppers spent an average of £19.09 each online on Christmas Day.

Televisions, mobile phones, digital cameras, MP3 players and digital photo frames were among the most popular online purchases.

James Roper, the chief executive of IMRG, said: “The only way we Brits can enjoy the nation’s favourite leisure activity – shopping – on Christmas Day, our biggest holiday of the year, is online. So it is hardly surprising that millions of us now do a spot of Yuletide bargain hunting.”

There was a visible surge of online activity after the end of the Queen’s message, but sales did not peak until after 8pm. IMRG’s Christmas Day figures came from sales data provided by SecureTrading, which tracks millions of transactions from 1,500 e-retailers in Britain. This was combined with online visitor numbers from eDigitalResearch.

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