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Online sales are shaping up once again to be the big winner this holiday season.

While some early data suggested that in-store traffic fell on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, online sales surged last week and into this week, peaking on Cyber Monday.

"Cyber Monday is expected to make history again as the biggest U.S. online shopping day of all time, driving a billion dollars more than last year," said Tamara Gaffney, a group director at Adobe Analytics, which measures 80 percent of online transactions at the largest 100 U.S. web retailers.

As of 3:30 p.m., $3.38 billion had been spent online on Monday, a 17 percent increase over last year, according to the firm.

Some of the biggest discounts online on Monday were on toys, as well as computers and TVs, the Adobe Analytics report said.

Online sales this month are up 17 percent over last year. By comparison, the National Retail Federation expects overall retail sales to grow 3.6 to 4 percent this holiday season.

But the online gains won't lift all boats equally. Analysts at Bain & Co. have projected that Amazon will pick up half of all holiday growth this year.

Minneapolis-based Target said some of the most popular items it sold online Monday were gaming consoles such as the Nintendo Switch and Xbox One, the Swagtron electric scooter, vacuums from Dyson and iRobot and TVs. Target, which offered 15 percent off sitewide on Monday, also is going to offer other digital deals every day this week.

Online sales also posted double-digit growth on the big shopping days last week while in-store traffic on those days dropped, according to Chicago-based traffic-tracking firm ShopperTrak.

The firm's preliminary results showed that visits to stores decreased 1.6 percent on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday compared with 2016.

The slide was more pronounced on Thanksgiving, partly because fewer retailers were open on the holiday this year. Store traffic on Black Friday decreased less than 1 percent, which analysts noted wasn't so bad given the big growth online.

"There has been a significant amount of debate surrounding the shifting importance of brick-and-mortar retail, and the fact that shopper visits remained intact on Black Friday illustrates that physical retail is still highly relevant and, when done right, profitable," Brian Field, ShopperTrak's senior director of advisory services, said in a statement.

Chuck Grom, an analyst with Gordon Haskett, said in a research note that about 65 percent of consumers made a purchase this year online or in a store during the Black Friday weekend, a 15 percent increase over last year. The customers spent a weighted average of $420.

"We walked away from the start to the holiday shopping season more bullish than we had anticipated," he said in the note.

Judging from both in-store and digital traffic, he said the weekend's big winners were Walmart, Kohl's, Amazon and Dollar Tree.

The retail team at Fung Global Retail & Technology visited 33 stores in six markets and came away with a slightly different list, saying that Walmart, Nike and Best Buy seemed to be the biggest victors of the weekend in terms of store traffic on Black Friday. They noted that inventory levels were pretty solid, too.

ShopperTrak expects Black Friday will once again end up being the busiest shopping day of the year. Most of the other top 10 days of the year are still to come next month, including Super Saturday, the last Saturday before Christmas, which it expects will be the second busiest day of the year.

Mall of America, which closed for the second year in a row on Thanksgiving, saw traffic on Black Friday match last year's record with 250,000 people visiting the mall that day. It had about 2,500 people waiting when doors opened at 5 a.m.

Kavita Kumar • 612-673-4113