Shoppers turn out, but hold on to their wallets

“A lot of customers got shopping done through ’Black Friday’ and through the weekend,” said spokesman Craig Berman. “We really look at holiday shopping as a season, not as a couple of really busy days.”

Target.com said its best sellers were toys and electronics and said as of midday Monday, traffic was trending up slightly compared to last year’s “Cyber Monday.”

Overall, there were few technical problems reported, but J. Crew, Victoria’s Secret, Gap and Old Navy sites were down for short periods.

Merchants want consumers to keep shopping after seeing modest sales gains over the Thanksgiving weekend.

John Morris, an analysts at Wachovia Capital Markets, wrote in a note published Monday that traffic and business were strong on Black Friday but that the “strength did not carry through the remainder of the weekend as business fell off sharply on Saturday.”

Karen MacDonald, a spokeswoman at mall operator Taubman Centers Inc., similarly said that based on a sampling of malls, business for the three-day weekend was flat from a year ago, with a sales spike on Friday that quickly fizzled.

“The momentum didn’t continue,” she said.

A more complete sales picture of the weekend will be known by Thursday, when the nation’s retailers report November same-store sales, or sales at stores opened at least a year. Many analysts expect the period could show a rare drop in sales.

Retailers are hoping the traffic has migrated online. Nielsen Online reported that online traffic grew 10 percent year-over-year on Black Friday to 31.7 million unique visitors across 120 online retailers. And online billing site PayPal said transactions increased 34 percent and online payment volume rose 26 percent on Black Friday.

Internet research company comScore said Sunday that online spending on Thanksgiving Day and Friday was up 2 percent compared with a year ago. While slightly better than the flat growth comScore has predicted for the holidays, the increase is still drastically lower than the 19 percent growth last year. For the holiday season to date, online sales are down about 4 percent to $10.41 billion, according to comScore.

The most likely candidate for busiest online spending day this year is Monday, Dec. 15, comScore spokesman Andrew Lipsman said, as consumers rush to make sure gifts can be shipped in time for Christmas.

“Cyber Monday is never really the heaviest online spending day,” he said. “It (marks) the first significant spike in online spending, but then spending continues to build really until about the middle of December.”

The online deals weren’t enticing Victoria Pericon, a mom in her thirties who lives in New York, to shop.

“With three children and other family members on list to shop for,” she said, “I will be waiting until closer to Christmas to do my shopping because I believe that is when stores, both online and offline, will offer better deals.”

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