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Retailers are bracing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday Getty

On the busiest shopping day of the year, e-commerce giant eBay expects a 9m customers to scour its UK website for discounts. Black Friday is expected to generate a spike of customers worth half of the average month's visitors.

eBay has tried to involve small businesses in its advertising campaign and expects that more than half of sales from the website will come from products sold by smaller companies. The marketplace works with about 200,000 small businesses in the UK.

Tanya Lawler, VP of eBay UK, said: "We're giving an even higher profile to our seller community during one of the busiest shopping periods of the year. Over 9m UK shoppers are expected to visit us on Black Friday alone – and we've put small businesses front and centre with that audience."

In 2014, small businesses were struggling to find a large audience for product sales. The government's Department for Business, Innovation and Skills found that most UK shoppers had a hard time finding small businesses online.

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eBay worked together with Woodford business LaptopOutletDirect, a small computer seller in North London. The company sold more than 10,000 windows Linx 7 tablets in just two days around Black Friday.

The e-commerce marketplace also found that at 8pm, smartphones experienced a peak, with 24 being sold per minute. Gamers browsed the website for video games in the early morning, which resulted in 11 products to be sold per minute at 4.22am on eBay.

These were the biggest selling products across the company on Black Friday in 2014:

  • Apple Macbooks
  • Windows laptops
  • Xbox consoles
  • smartphones
Black Friday