With the economy in its current state and the holiday shopping season now upon us in full force, many eyes have been on the results of the retail sector, expecting them to be an indicator of the economy as a whole and trends to come.

If performance on Black Friday (News - Alert) is a true indicator, the news is good. For Internet sales, volume was steady Friday as compared to last year. This performance is positive despite the worsening economic outlook and further signs that U.S. consumers are cutting back on spending.

Yahoo! Tech reported that online sales on Friday were $534 million, a one percent increase from 2007. According to comScore, which tracks Internet sales, performance was even stronger on Thanksgiving Day, November 27, with an increase of six percent to reach $288 million.

The Yahoo! report highlighted that while these numbers seem to indicate consumer spending may be more resilient than many observers have forecasted, online spending since the start of the holiday shopping season is actually down.

The official start of the shopping season was Nov. 1 and the measured loss is four percent to $10.4 billion. comScore noted that this is a shortfall of $429 million as compared to last year. The company said that consumers were likely persuaded to spend by steep discounts offered on Friday by Internet retailers.

Industry analysts are now also watching what will happen today. Dubbed Cyber Monday (News - Alert), the Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday weekend is a more important measure of online holiday sales performance than that of Thanksgiving or Black Friday.

According to comScore, today is the first U.S. work day after the holiday and roughly half of all online purchases made in the U.S. are made during work hours. With so many workers still recovering from the break, the pull to shop online is much stronger than the pull to get work done.

The company also pointed out that in previous years, the increase in online sales on Cyber Monday has been within just a few percentage points of the overall growth rate for holiday spending.

"Cyber Monday may well prove to be an important indicator of whether the decline in spending that we've seen during the first few weeks of the online holiday season will continue for the balance of the year," the market research company said in a statement.

To sum it up, comScore forecasts that holiday spending will be flat this year compared to 2007. One must wonder, however if that could change with constant reports of strong performance within the retail sector. Only time will tell.