Amid all the economic doom and gloom, there's a bright spot for online retailers. For the week including and after Cyber Monday (Dec. 1 - Dec.5) online sales hit $3.74 billion, up 9 percent from last year, according to Comscore. But the numbers can be slightly deceiving, as the holiday shopping season is shorter this year than last.

The fastest growing categories during this period were sports/fitness (35%), consumer electronics (24%) and toys and apparrel/accessories (16%). Interestingly, both jewelry/watches and music/movies/videos were down, at -22% and -24%, respectively.

So where were consumer's spending all that cash? The top retail sites in terms of unique visitors last week were eBay (-9%), Amazon sites (10%), Wal-mart (7%), Target (-2%) and Apple (29%). eBay continues its free fall, and Overstock.com fared worse, dropping 15% from the same period last year.