After a lackluster Black Friday shopping week, blamed in part on the lack of good deals for shoppers, retailers hoped for a better Cyber Monday. Cyber Monday sales are reported to have been up by 3% by with total sales of $8.26 billion.

Despite sales growth on Cyber Monday, things have slowed in online shopping. Comscore shows that the most recent week of December 8 -12 sales slowed by 1%. Since Cyber Monday, the top sales categories (in order) are apparel and accessories, books and magazines, flowers and greetings, video games, computer hardware, toys and consumer electronics.

"After a very strong first week of December, e-commerce sales growth slowed somewhat during the most recent week," said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. "However, the week still managed to see a few particularly strong spending days, with sales of $887 million on Tuesday, December 9 surpassing Green Monday last year (December 10, 2007) as the heaviest online spending day on record. With Christmas now fast approaching, look for online retailers to continue to offer enticing last-minute deals, including discounts on expedited shipping, to spur a final wave of spending. In fact, some retailers are even willing to offer free shipping as late as December 18 this year with a guarantee that the shipment will arrive by Christmas Eve. It will be interesting to see the impact that this offer has in terms of pulling additional spending from retail stores to the online channel."

Via Comscore