Online sales spiked significantly on Cyber Monday last week, according to several reports, bringing a bit of good news to online and multichannel retailers during what is expected to be a slow holi­day season. However, sales were down in some sectors as compared with 2007.

The PC is no longer just a place for watching a couple of minutes of online content: This year, long-form TV and movie viewing on the Web took off.

Thanksgiving weekend, consid­ered the official kickoff of the holiday shopping season, is even more significant this year, because consumers have shown a remarkable lack of interest in shopping recently. Compounding matters, retailers face a shorter holiday shopping season than normal, with Thanksgiving coming late in the month.

Recent results posted by Whole Foods Market have stirred some doubts about the health of the organic food mar­ket in today's economy.

Toy catalog and Internet retailers are scrambling to meet deadlines for new regulations from the Consumer Product Safety Commission regarding the banning of lead and phthalates in toys, as well as how they inform consumers about toy safety warnings.

Earlier this month, Mom Central Consulting, an agency that targets moth­ers, released a 55-page trend report, Illu­minating the Power of Mom Bloggers.

More retailers are embracing social media for their marketing efforts. Accord­ing to a study by interactive marketing agency Rosetta, which was formerly known as Brulant, 59% of the top 100 USonline retailers currently have a page on Facebook, up from 30% in April.

Last week, the e-mail list industry saw the biggest decline it had seen in 20 years, according to Worldata's Fall 2008 List Price Index. Permission-based e-mail business-to-business lists, the highest-priced category with an October 2008 straight average price of $293/M, took the biggest hit, with a decrease of $12/M from last year.

As a category, gift cards have tradition­ally kept giving — their sales have posted regular gains over the past few holiday seasons.

During a conference call this week with reporters, the National Retail Federation and Bigresearch said that many of the same factors that have hurt retail sales much of this year will continue to have a negative impact during the upcoming holiday season.