Despite the push to move up the holiday season to ease the constraints of one of the shortest shopping windows in years, plenty of people saved their lists for after Thanksgiving Day.
Shoppers are expected to be careful about spending again at the holidays this year. For a couple of years now, inflation has dominated the news, obscured retail sales growth, shaken up consumers and even overshadowed the presidential election that took place early this month. While inflation has eased and some retailers have made a point of slashing prices in recent weeks, budgets continue to be tight for many households. They may not get much relief if the tariffs promised by now President-elect Donald Trump come to pass.
This could have consequences for holiday sales. Nordstrom earlier this week said that sales trailed off at the start of the fourth quarter, suggesting that the momentum it experienced in Q3 may not hold up.
Still, Black Friday was busy. This year, worldwide, Black Friday hit its peak at just after 2 p.m. Eastern time, according to Block, which tracked transactions across its Square, Afterpay, and Cash App Card platforms. U.S. retail sales (excluding auto sales) were up 3.4% compared to Black Friday last year, according to Mastercard’s SpendingPulse report, which measured in-store and online retail sales, included all payment types and was not adjusted for inflation.
Buy now, pay later plans helped finance purchases, driving 8.8% more in online spend than last year, reaching $686.3 million, per Adobe Analytics, which found that to be especially true for mobile shopping, with a 79.3% share compared to desktop so far.
“Our real-time insights show that consumers are comfortably in the gift-giving spirit as price reductions and deals occur across sectors, supporting budgets for holiday shopping,” Michelle Meyer, chief economist at the Mastercard Economics Institute, said in emailed comments.
Further numbers around Thanksgiving weekend sales will continue to be crunched in coming days, but here are the ups and downs of Black Friday so far.
Winners
E-commerce
Cyber Monday appears to be losing its meaning, with many shoppers using their phones and computers on Black Friday to make headway on their holiday lists.
Salesforce found that on Friday online sales in the U.S. rose 7% year over year to $17.5 billion, while Adobe found that they rose 10.2% to $10.8 billion. Between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., $11.3 million was spent online every minute, per Adobe.
“Crossing the $10 billion mark is a big e-commerce milestone for Black Friday, for a day that in the past was more anchored towards in-store shopping,” Vivek Pandya, lead analyst at Adobe Digital Insights, said in emailed comments. “And with consumers getting more comfortable with everything from mobile shopping to chat bots, we have tailwinds that can prop up online growth for Black Friday moving forward.”
Chatbots and AI
The current buzz around artificial intelligence is giving rise to both fear and excitement, as questions swirl about the forward leap in tech and its effects, and they made their mark on Black Friday this year. AI and AI agents drove more than $14 billion in global online sales on Black Friday, and retailers employing generative artificial intelligence had a 9% higher conversion rate than those that didn’t, according to Salesforce.
Chatbots powered by AI were influential, as bot-driven clicks to retail sites rose by a whopping 1,800% compared to last year, Adobe found. A fifth of those surveyed by Adobe said they used chatbots to find deals, with 19% using them to find items and 15% using them for brand recommendations.
“Digital retailers who are using generative AI and agents in their customer service experiences saw a nine percent higher conversion rate compared to those who are not,” Caila Schwartz, director of consumer insights at Salesforce, said in emailed comments. “For an industry that is often concerned with margins, especially ahead of rising costs in 2025, this percent increase is a game-changer.”
Toys
The toy category has encountered some rough times lately, with an 8% downturn in sales last year. Circana analysts over the summer warned that signs of a turnaround earlier this year held no guarantees, given ongoing macroeconomic uncertainty around unemployment, record consumer debt, student loans and consumer confidence.
But toys had a good day on Black Friday, with online sales up 622% compared to average daily sales last month, according to Adobe. Top sellers included Harry Potter Lego sets; items related to the “Wicked” movie; card and board games; Disney Princess toys and dolls; and the Cookeez Makery oven playset, per that report.
Losers
In-store shopping
Employing old-fashioned seasonal enticements like doorbusters and entertainment, the Mall of America said that people began lining up early afternoon on Thanksgiving Day and that it welcomed more than 13,000 shoppers in the hour after it opened at 7 a.m. on Black Friday.
In general, however, it looks like this year’s e-commerce boost came at the expense of brick-and-mortar stores. Nora Kleinewillinghoefer, a partner in the consumer practice of Kearney, noted that “Black Friday felt quieter” this year in stores, while Michael Brown, also a Kearney partner, noted a relatively subdued day at Garden State Plaza in New Jersey, though he said that shoppers included younger people and some apparel retailers were busy.
Overall, store traffic on Black Friday was down 3.2%, with footfall down 7% in the Midwest, 2.1% in the Northeast, 3.5% in the South and 3.2% in the West, according to data from RetailNext. Mastercard found that Black Friday online sales rose 14.6% year over year, while in-store sales rose just 0.7% year over year.
Moreover, online carts were more than twice the size of in-store carts, according to payment firm Block.
This is in part due to early shopping that seems to have been conducted primarily online, in a year when “the period between Black Friday and Christmas is unusually short,” according to emailed comments from Darpan Seth, CEO of omnichannel order management advisory and software firm Nextuple.
It’s also because retailers are now better at making more goods available online that in previous years may have only been available in stores, Seth said.
Prices and margins
Black Friday has long been about getting good deals, but some discounts this year were especially steep.
Categories more exposed to inflation and higher-priced items were primed for deep price cuts. Plus retailers themselves may preemptively clear out inventory that could eventually be subjected to Trump’s tariffs, according to Nextuple’s Seth.
Adobe found that “discounts exceeded expectations” and were a purchase motivator for toys (with peak discounts of 27.8% off list price), as well as for electronics (27.4% off), televisions (24.2% off), apparel (22.2% off), computers (22% off) and sporting goods (19.5% off). Discounts are expected to remain elevated through the shopping weekend, per that report.
In fact, Black Friday-esque discounts may be found throughout the holiday shopping period, according to Joe Shasteen, global manager of advanced analytics at RetailNext.
“Broader economic pressures, such as high grocery prices and the rising cost of living, may have further impacted shoppers’ behavior,” Shasteen said in emailed comments. “Inflation-fatigued consumers appear to be prioritizing essential purchases and carefully weighing discretionary spending, underscoring the continued importance of value-driven shopping decisions this holiday season. Additionally, many retailers have extended Black Friday deals to widen the shopping window, offering consumers more time to find discounts and spread out their shopping across the holiday period.”
Black Friday
Thanks once again to e-commerce, Thanksgiving Day itself is stealing Black Friday’s thunder as a red-letter retail sales day. This year, shoppers spent $6.1 billion online on Thanksgiving, a record amount that was 8.8% above last year, according to Adobe.
That growth outpaces last year, too, when Thanksgiving Day online sales grew 5.5%, per Adobe’s report. What’s more, holiday shopping in general has been spread out beyond the Thanksgiving-to-Cyber Monday period, experts said.
“With brands expanding their deals across days or even weeks, the once-frenzied in-person rush is evolving into a digital-first experience,” Kearney’s Kleinewillinghoefer said in emailed comments. “Black Friday is no longer just a single shopping event — it has become part of a broader sales extravaganza. With Cyber Monday dominating e-commerce and Travel Tuesday catering to wanderlust, the holiday season is now a crowded marketplace of endless deals.”