MADRID (MarketWatch) — On the heels of data showing a record number of shoppers hit the stores over the holiday weekend, one digital-analysis group says spending on the most important shopping day of the year for online retailers, known as Cyber Monday, could reach $1.5 billion. 
 
 According to data released Sunday from comScore Inc. SCOR, -2.94% Cyber Monday spending is expected to exceed the $1.25 billion reached in 2011 for a gain of 20%. Spending on Cyber Monday — a marketing term coined back in 2005 — has more than doubled in the past five years. 
 
 “With Thanksgiving now behind us and most consumers returning to work tomorrow [Monday], we can look forward with anticipation to Cyber Monday, which according to norms we’ve observed over the past three years should be the heaviest online shopping day of the season with sales approaching $1.5 billion or even higher,” said Gian Fulgoni, comScore chairman, in a statement. 
 
 Black Friday stokes season hopes (28:44) Simon Constable and Andria Cheng discuss the holiday-shopping season, and Dan Neil reviews the 2013 Mercedes-Benz GL350. (Photo: AP) 
 
 Forecasts for Cyber Monday sales are slightly less buoyant than what comScore has reported for other key shopping days. The group’s data showed that online sales for Black Friday surpassed $1 billion for the first time. Sales rose 26% to $1.04 billion from $816 million seen on Black Friday in 2011. 
 
 ComScore data showed that Thanksgiving Day online sales grew 32% from a year earlier, to $633 million. 
 
 Fulgoni says the data point to the idea that Black Friday is growing more prominent in the e-commerce channel, particularly for shoppers who want to avoid heavy crowds. 
 
 “With Black Friday online sales up 26% and surpassing $1 billion for the first time, coupled with early reports indicating that Black Friday sales in retail stores were down 1.8%, we can now confidently call it a multichannel-marketing phenomenon,” added Fulgoni. Read comScore blog on historical importance of holiday spending to e-commerce. 
 
 Excluding auction sites such as eBay Inc. EBAY, -0.40% according to comScore, the top e-retailer for Black Friday sales was Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, +0.99% followed by the websites for Wal-Mart Stores Inc. WMT, -0.21% Best Buy Co. BBY, +1.01% Target Corp. TGT, +0.07% and Apple Inc. AAPL, +0.96% 
 
 Demand for digital books, audio and video content led those sales with a 29% gain over the prior year, followed by a 27% rise for toy sales and 23% for consumer packaged goods. 
 
 Reuters 
 
 Amazon.com was among those advertising Cyber Monday deals, such as much as $100 off on selected Sony laptops and a deal offering the Kindle Fire for $129, reduced from $159. Read about Amazon's Cyber Monday deals. 
 
 The National Retail Federation said Sunday that a record 247 million Americans shopped in stores and online during the four-day holiday weekend, a gain of 9% from the year-ago period. Within that number, 35 million Americans shopped online and in brick-and-mortar stores on Thanksgiving Day, and 89 million shopped on Black Friday. Read: Record count of holiday-weekend shoppers. 
 
 The NRF expects nearly 123 million consumers to shop on Cyber Monday. 
 
 Retailers kicked off shopping even earlier this year, with Wal-Mart, Toys “R” Us Inc. and Target among those offering “door-buster” promotions even earlier on Thanksgiving eve. Early traffic indicators were giving retailers some hope for what is a critical shopping period for them. Read: Black Friday gives retailers holiday hope. 
 
 Also read: Black Friday mania in consumer tech. ||||| But this weekend's shopping spree provides another important lesson. It tells us how we shop. The key storyline of Thanksgiving 2011 is not about mobs lining up at midnight. It's about buyers leaning back with iPads after the big family dinner. It's about the continuing rise of online, and especially mobile, shopping. 
 
 Here's what the numbers don't tell us: anything useful about the recovery. Are shoppers really more confident about the economy? Or are they just desperate for deals? We don't know. The last time shoppers spent this much over Thanksgiving were the dark days of 2008. Afterwards, holiday sales promptly fell off a cliff. 
 
 Here's what the Black Friday/Cyber Monday numbers tell us: Americans just spent a lot of money. The National Retail Federation estimates that Americans spent a record $52 billion dollars through Sunday. That doesn't include the online retail haul from Cyber Monday. Online sales on Cyber Monday eclipsed last year's record of $1.03 billion, according to Coremetrics. 
 
 This year's Thanksgiving sales don't tell us anything about the health of our economy. But they do show us something about its digital future. 
 
 Consider these numbers. On Black Friday, in-store purchases increased about 7%. But online, Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday sales jumped by 39%, 24% and 33%, respectively. 
 
 
 
 Growth in mobile was even more explosive. PayPal reported that payments via phones and tablets were up more than 500% on each of the three major shopping days. IBM said mobile devices were responsible for 9.8% percent of online Black Friday sales, up from 3.2% a year ago. 
 
 
 
 So no, mobile hasn't replaced good old fashioned Black Friday chaos. It hasn't even replaced regular old web browsing. But it's arrived as a key piece of holiday commerce. And it's only going to get bigger. 
 
 That has implications across business. For retail, it means adjusting to customers who are harder to lure and more discriminating. More people are doing their shopping while sitting with family on Thanksgiving proper rather than waiting for a trip to the mall the next day. And when they do make that trip to Macy's or Target, shoppers can browse the aisles phone in hand, comparing prices. For Silicon Valley, it underscores the need to win the mobile arms race. In the end, the fates of the tech's giants are tied to our shopping habits. Google and Facebook live off ads. Amazon lives off eCommerce. And as more and more Americans shop on phones and tablets, owning those spaces will be ever more crucial to their business models. It's why Amazon has the Kindle Fire, and why Facebook is working on a new phone with HTC. 
 
 Thanksgiving sales won't tell us whether the economy is about to take off. But they do tell us what we've become as a shopping culture. More than that, as the biggest consumer nation on earth, it tells us where we're headed as a business culture. Our future is on our phones. And the companies that learn to compete in that environment are the companies that will survive. 
 
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– Black Friday sales were down year-on-year, but this year's Cyber Monday is expected to be the biggest online shopping day in history. Spending on the year's most important day for online sales is expected to top last year's $1.25 billion by around 20% to hit $1.5 billion, the chairman of digital analysis group ComScore tells MarketWatch. Online spending on the Monday after Thanksgiving has more than doubled over the last five years. But Black Friday itself saw plenty of online shopping, with sales nudging over $1 billion for the first time even as shoppers thronged brick-and-mortar stores, the AP reports. Analysts say that Cyber Monday may soon cease to be the busiest day for online sales, since fewer people now rely on computers at work to do their shopping. Online sales on Thanksgiving Day this year surged by 32% over 2011 to reach $633 million.