The Nintendo Wii, the Simpsons and Jason Bourne helped Amazon to record Christmas with online orders hitting a peak of one every 11 seconds in the UK.

The US-run internet giant shipped products to more than 200 countries, with orders hitting 5.4 million on December 10, Amazon's busiest day.

The Nintendo Wii, this year's must-have games system, was the big star: Amazon said that it sold about 17 Wiis a second while the product was in stock.

DVDs including The Bourne Ultimatum, The Simpsons Movie and Shrek the Third dominated the site's top ten bestselling gifts in the UK. Other top selllers included the latest book by the television chef Nigella Lawson, the iPod Nano, the perennially popular Rubik's cube and 20Q, an electronic mind-reading game.

On December 10, Amazon UK took more than 950,000 orders - one every 11 seconds - but in the latest sign that customers delayed their spending this Christmas, Amazon said the peak demand came seven days later than normal this year.

Amazon says it registered a 99 per cent delivery success rate, in stark contrast to reports earlier this week that hundreds of thousands of Christmas gifts ordered over the web may not be posted in time for December 25.

News of Amazon's pre-Christmas success pushed the company's shares up 2 per cent on Nasdaq yesterday to a close of $92.85.

Strong retail sales online have eased some concerns about an impending downturn in consumer spending in the UK.

Figures from Internet Media Retail Group, the research specialist, suggest online sales are on course to finish December at £7.4 billion, more than double the same month last year.

Online retailers in the UK drew more than 3.5 million shoppers to their sites on their busiest Christmas Day ever. Internet shoppers seeking early sales bargains spent around £53 million, as leading high street names including Marks & Spencer offered discounts of up to 70 per cent on their websites.

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