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Black Friday Sales Up 26 Percent To $816M, Says Report

Online retailers saw a surge in sales Friday, according to the latest numbers from comScore, seeing $816M in online sales, a 26 percent increase over last year's Black Friday. comScore said it tracked more than 50 million Americans visiting online retail sites on the traditional opener to the holiday spending season. The total for the current holiday season, which kicked off November 1st, is $12.7 billion in online sales. Black Friday ranked as the heaviest online spending day to date in 2011, comsScore reported. Sales for Thanksgiving Day were also up, by around 18 percent, with sales tallies reaching $479M, up from $407M last year. Retailers and others will be closely watching sales activity today, Cyber Monday, which traditionally had been the biggest day of online spending, due to people taking advantage of high speed Internet connections at work to get some holiday shopping done. Last year comScore tallied up more than $1 billion in sales for Cyber Monday.