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The Thanksgiving shopping weekend doesn't appear to have been the disaster some had feared, but tempered buying and unprecedented deep discounts likely resulted in soft sales. Now, online retailers are ramping up heavy-duty deals to turn skittish shoppers into "Cyber Monday" spenders.

"Cyber Monday," a term coined by the trade group National Retail Federation in 2005 to describe the Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday, is the unofficial kickoff for the busy online retail season.

The nation's merchants are struggling to entice financially strapped shoppers for the rest of the holiday shopping season, expected to be the weakest in decades. Online sales are expected to be fairly flat after years of strong growth.

"The consumer clearly is showing us that there is a holiday to be had, but the consumer wants bigger deals. And they are not panicking," said Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst at NPD Group, a market research group. "They're willing to wait it out at almost any price."

Cohen predicts sales for the weekend, the traditional start of the holiday shopping season, were at best even with the same holiday weekend a year ago. The trade group National Retail Federation expects overall holiday spending will total about $470.4 billion, a 2.2 percent rise from a year ago and the slowest growth since 2002, and online retail is being hit along with brick-and-mortar stores.

If stores are already offering up to 75 percent off - a move likely to hurt profits - what more can they do? With mounds of inventory that merchants need to clear, Cohen said he expects retailers will be doing more two-for-one deals.

Still, the crowds that turned out for the early morning specials on Friday were a welcome relief to the nation's retailers - who since mid-September have suffered from the most dramatic falloff in spending in decades amid a ballooning financial crisis.