Online Retailers Offer Deals To Cash In On Cyber MondayOnline Retailers Offer Deals To Cash In On Cyber Monday

Many holiday shoppers, hungry for deals online, spent Monday shopping from home and work.

"Retailers will be unveiling a variety of incredible one-day sales on Cyber Monday to bring consumers to their Web sites," said Scott Silverman, executive director of Shop.org, an association for online retailers. "Online retailers consider Cyber Monday a virtual Black Friday and will be offering promotions that will be tough to beat later in the holiday season."

Wal-Mart is offering holiday discounts throughout the week, beginning Monday with a deal on the Xbox 360, with games and a bag. The store is among 72.2% of online retailers that planned special Cyber Monday promotions, up from 42.7% in 2005, according to Shop.org's eHoliday survey.

Shopzilla predicted more than 72 million shoppers on Cyber Monday, according to the survey. That's up from 60.7 million last year and 59 million in 2005. The survey found that 31.9% of adults planned to shop on Cyber Monday, up 17.3% from last year.

Shop.org said that while some Americans shop online from home, many also planned to do so from work. A survey conducted by BIGresearch, found that 54.5% of office workers with Internet access -- 68.5 million people -- planned to do some holiday shopping from work.

Some sites had difficulty handling their traffic surges.

Costco's Web site slowed down significantly on Cyber Monday, while Blockbuster and Overstock cranked out sales, according to Gomez' global Web site measuring network.

Since the end of October, Gomez has held "Merchant Madness," a competition measuring online performance of 64 retailers' Web sites. The two sites vied for the top spot on Monday. Gomez will name the winners Tuesday.

"Cyber Monday is when the rubber meets the road for online retailers. Even a minute of outage on Cyber Monday can equate to hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue," Matt Poepsel, Gomez' VP of performance strategies, said in a prepared statement. "Retailers that thoroughly pretested their Web sites way back in the summer -- simulating peak loads that actually mirror their customers' mix of computers -- are best poised to secure their sales."

Gomez pointed out that major Web sites for companies like Amazon, Target, Wal-Mart, Circuit City, Gap, Macy's, and HP showed that performance can be a challenge even for big name brands during the holiday shopping season.

Shop.org held a real-world Shop at Lunch promotion with discount coupons for those who showed up at the event in Washington, D.C.