The online push from Black Friday continued into Cyber Monday. Coremetrics, a web analytics company, found that sales were up 19.6% year-over-year as of 1:00 PM Monday. Online may account for only 10% of spending during the holiday season (7% overall), but it remains the bright spot in what has been a lackluster kickoff to the holiday season.

Black Friday spending was up only 0.5% this year, though Black Friday online spending jumped 35%. For Friday and Saturday, ShopperTrak reports that retail sales were up 0.9% to $16.77 billion, while customer traffic dropped 2.7%.

All the hope and hype that went into Black Friday preparations this year didn't give us much. Year-over-year, retail sales grew only 0.5%, from $10.61 billion to $10.66 billion, according to ShopperTrak. This follows a 3% gain last year, when the world was gripped by the panic triggered by the global financial crisis. In 2007, the situation was much better, with Black Friday sales leaping 8.3%.

The slight gain this year came even with the extra efforts retailers made, which included, in some cases, opening on Thanksgiving Day and making an extra push via social media. These measures effectively helped retailers tread water.

Online retail sales are expected to increase 3% to $28.8 billion for this year's holiday season. The analysts at comScore include traditional retailers, like Macy's (M) in this estimate, but don't count auction sites like eBay (EBAY), travel or corporate sales. The estimate compares favorably against the National Retail Federation's forecast of a 1% year-over-year drop for all retail sales and exceeds the industry's most aggressive holiday season sales estimates of 2%.

Last year, online retail sales fell 3% for the holiday season, the first decline since the industry started keeping score in 2001. Even if we don't hit the 3% growth level this year, 2009 is still expected to be better than 2008, now that the economy has stabilized (at least relative to last year).