comScore reported its tracking of holiday season retail e-commerce spending for the first 31 days of the November - December 2008 holiday season. For the holiday season-to-date, $12.03 billion has been spent online, marking a 2 percent decline versus the corresponding days last year. However, Cyber Monday saw $846 million in online spending, up 15 percent. The four-day period from Black Friday through Cyber Monday saw e-commerce spending jump 13 percent as both weekend days and Monday all achieved double-digit gains.

"Mark Twain might have said: "Rumors of the death of online holiday shopping have been greatly exaggerated," said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. "Consumers are clearly responding positively to retailers' aggressive online discounts. With Cyber Monday promotions beginning in earnest over the Thanksgiving weekend, consumers have finally begun to open their wallets, setting off a streak of four consecutive days of extremely strong growth, and culminating in a Cyber Monday that racked up an impressive $846 million in online spending, up 15 percent over last year and ranking it as the second heaviest online spending day on record. This is an extremely encouraging development for retailers and we can but hope that their aggressive discounting has still left room for profits."

Consumers Seeing Less Foot Traffic in Retail Stores

The most recent comScore holiday retail survey, conducted from November 28 - December 1, revealed that some additional insights into consumers' views of the 2008 holiday shopping season.

Some of the key survey findings include:

- More than half (51 percent) of consumers indicated that the level of promotions and discounts is higher this year than last year, while only 12 percent said that there appeared to be fewer, suggesting that retailers are having to be more aggressive in discounting to spur consumer spending.

- 39 percent of consumers said that there seemed to be fewer people out shopping in retail stores this year than last year, while only 7 percent thought there were more.