Black Friday live: Watch the money pile up in real-time with this graph of minute-by-minute spending

The tool tracks online transactions at major retailers like Tesco and Sports Direct

While thousands of desparate shoppers brave stores to fight for Black Friday bargains, many others opt for the relative safety of online shopping

A new online tool is helping to measure the scale with which Black Friday has gripped Britain this year.

The graph of online retail transactions reveals many people staying up well into the small hours of Thursday to bag online bargains, with others choosing to getting up before 6am the next day to beat the online crowds.

The tool, powered by web services company Postcode Anywhere, tracks spending at 9,000 online retailers taking part in the discounting. It includes Tesco, Boots, Sports Direct, Reiss and other large UK department stores.

In the early hours of this morning the tool recorded as many as 488 per cent more transactions compared to a normal shopping day in November.

The action has continued well into normal working hours, with a 124 per cent increase in people shopping online after 9am. Bosses across the country fear that workers may be ignoring their work to hunt for bargains online.

With eyes on the dramatic Black Friday scuffles in millions of bricks-and-mortar stores, millions of bargain hunters are also trying their luck on the internet.

Online shopping gives dramatically lower chance of being subject to physical violence.

Major retail websites including Tesco, Argos, PC World and Boots have been experiencing huge slowdowns and crashes this morning because their systems are unable to cope with peak traffic.

The Curry's website instructed shoppers to join an online queue with an estimated waiting time of 30 minutes to shop online, telling visitors: "We're really sorry that the huge demand for our deals means you’re having to wait."

Postcode Anywhere is the largest supplier of address lookup services in the UK any processes billions of online transactions across different retailers.

The data for the graph collected when a person enters their postcode at the checkout of an online store. While this is not necessarily a complete transaction, the company says its data is “indicative of ecommerce volume” in the UK.

The tool can be found HERE.