SmallBusinessNewz

Well, here's a nice surprise: Black Friday's come and gone, and the business world didn't end.  In fact, businesses seem to have done all right, with a new comScore report putting the eCommerce community in a better position than many people had anticipated.

Online spending on Black Friday increased one percent compared to last year, while tossing together Thanksgiving and Black Friday spending yields a year-over-year increase of two percent.  These are small gains, of course, but anything's better than a decline.  Now the whole holiday season looks ready to start on the right foot.

comScore's chairman, Gian Fulgoni, explained in a statement, "It's probable that on Black Friday consumers responded positively to the very aggressive promotions and discounts being offered in retail stores, so it will be important to see how they respond to similarly attractive deals being offered online on Cyber Monday, the traditional kick-off to the online holiday shopping season."

Keep your nose to the figurative grindstone, then, but breathe a little more freely thanks to the comScore data.  Also know that several major sites have experienced outages and/or slowdowns due to huge amounts of traffic, so the shoppers are definitely out there.

One last note: since comScore found that a whole lot of Black Friday's online spending occurred after 4 PM, you shouldn't get disheartened if Cyber Monday doesn't look too magical as normal business hours come to a close.