Grappling with the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, US online shoppers tend to spend more on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday for better prices.

Yesterday, comScore reported that, for the holiday season-to-date, shoppers has spent $10.41 billion online, 4% decline in comparison to the corresponding days last year, while Black Friday saw $534 million in online spending, up 1%. Gian Fulgoni, comScore chairman, commented:

Early reports suggest that Black Friday sales in retail stores were slightly better than anticipated in this depressed retail climate, and that performance apparently extended to the online channel, which saw sales on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday combined increase 2 percent versus year ago. 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.

Though eBay had forecast a weaker holiday this year as consumers cut back on discretionary purchases, PayPal, whose sales numbers reflected 12 % of all US e-commerce, saw almost 34% more transactions this Black Friday than a year earlier which translated to 26% sales raise.

According to Amazon, Apple Inc’s iPod touch was the top-selling electronics item on Friday morning, Canon Inc PowerShot camera was the second while Wii Fit and the Wii console were the top-selling items in the video game category, LeapFrog Tag Reading System was the best-selling toy.

On eBay, Nintendo’s Wii console was the hottest item being searched for and 3,171 were sold on the site. Other electronics were also hot, with a GPS navigation system selling every 9 minutes and an MP3 player selling every 11 minutes on Shopping.com, another site owned by eBay.