On paper, Black Friday 2025 looked like a win for retailers. U.S. e-commerce sales reached $11.8 billion, up 9.1% year over year according to Adobe Analytics. Salesforce estimates put total U.S. online Black Friday sales even higher, at $18 billion, a 3% increase versus 2024. Shopify data from its point-of-sale network shows 26% year-over-year growth in U.S. offline sales.
But behind the revenue growth is a less cheerful story for consumers:
•Online order volume fell 1% in the U.S.
•Average selling prices rose 7%.
•Units per transaction dropped 2%, meaning shoppers bought fewer items per order.
In other words, retailers grew sales by charging more, not by selling significantly more goods. Flat discount rates and higher base prices meant Black Friday 2025 felt more like a full-price shopping day wearing a promotional mask.
The big winner? Retailers’ top-line numbers.
The big loser? The consumer’s wallet.
Black Friday Has Become a Data Point, Not a Frenzy
Industry analysts agree that the Black Friday of old — doorbusters, pre-dawn queues, and a single-day spending frenzy — is fading.
Marshal Cohen, chief retail advisor at Circana, notes that Black Friday is still “very important,” but no longer a high-intensity, must-buy-now event. Supported by years of “early Black Friday” and “Cyber Week” marketing, the event has stretched into a multi-day, multi-channel promotion window rather than a single decisive moment.
Melissa Minkow, global director of retail strategy and insights at CI&T, points out that it’s now “too fluid and too confusing” to treat Black Friday as just one day, given how continuously consumers are bombarded with deals throughout November.
Adding further complexity, 2024 was a U.S. election year — historically a drag on retail sales — which will make year-over-year comparisons for full-year 2025 data more difficult.
Black Friday is no longer the climax of holiday shopping; it’s one important data point in a longer hunt for value.
Winner: AI Becomes the New Traffic Engine of Retail
If there was one clear structural winner in 2025, it was artificial intelligence as the new front door to retail.
According to Adobe:
•AI-driven traffic to U.S. retail websites surged 805% versus Black Friday 2024.
•Shoppers who landed on a retail site via an AI service were 38% more likely to convert than those coming from non-AI sources.
•AI tools were most heavily used in categories such as video games, appliances, electronics, toys, personal care, and baby products.
Salesforce data adds more detail:
•Traffic from third-party AI agent channels jumped 300% in the first half of Black Friday, both globally and in the U.S.
•$3 billion in U.S. online sales were driven by AI and agents during the day.
•AI-driven customer service (“agentic service conversations”) grew 42% compared with Thanksgiving.
For retailers, this marks a significant shift: AI is no longer just an internal efficiency tool — it is becoming a consumer-facing discovery, decision, and service layer.
From a storetechnews perspective, this signals three structural changes:
1.AI as a new search engine: Instead of typing keywords into a search bar, shoppers increasingly ask AI agents, “Find me the best 4K TV under $500,” and follow the recommendation.
2.Retail sites must be AI-readable: Product data, pricing, and inventory must be structured so AI agents can understand and surface it. Poor data hygiene will directly hurt visibility.
3.Customer service becomes semi-automated: With AI handling a growing share of pre-purchase questions and post-purchase support, retailers that integrate agentic tools well will reduce friction and boost conversion.
For brands and retailers, “SEO” is quietly expanding into “AIO” — Optimization for AI agents.
Winner: Stores That Offered More Than Just Discounts
With discounts looking similar across retailers and categories, the only stores that really stood out were those offering something you couldn’t get online.
Circana’s Cohen notes that the only locations truly busy early on Black Friday morning were Target stores — hardly accidental. Target gave the first 100 guests at each store a limited-edition tote bag filled with giveaways, turning a routine visit into a small event.
Lowe’s took a similar approach:
•A bucket of products for the first 50 customers, plus
•A chance to win an in-stock appliance worth up to $2,000.
Meanwhile, a lack of merchandising “newness” — many hot products looked very similar to last year’s — blunted excitement. Discounts alone weren’t enough to motivate a trip; exclusive perks and experiential hooks were.
As Cohen quipped in essence:
“Build it and they will come” is no longer true.
“Give me a gift, and I’ll show up” is closer to today’s reality.
For retailers, especially big-box and department stores, this underlines a simple but powerful lesson: If everyone has the same prices, traffic follows experience, not percentage-off banners.
Loser: Online Orders and Real Purchasing Power
Despite the upbeat revenue headlines, Salesforce’s data paints a more sober picture of demand:
•Online order volume in the U.S. fell 1% year over year.
•Average selling price rose 7%, reflecting higher prices rather than stronger underlying demand.
•Units per transaction dropped 2%, so shoppers walked away with fewer items per basket.
Caila Schwartz, director of consumer insights at Salesforce, described Black Friday as a key signal for the U.S. economy: sales look strong, but inflation is still biting into household budgets.
From a tech-and-retail lens, this aligns with what POS and e-commerce platforms have been reporting for months:
•Shoppers are more deliberate.
•They are trading down or buying fewer items.
•They are using tools — including AI — to optimize every dollar.
Loser: Meaningful Discounts
Despite inflation and consumer stress, discount depth didn’t improve meaningfully in 2025. In many cases, it barely moved at all.
Salesforce found that online discount rates on Black Friday:
•Peaked at 28% in the U.S.
•Peaked at 27% globally
•Were essentially flat versus 2024.
Gartner analyst Brad Jashinsky notes that most value and specialty apparel retailers offered the same headline percentage-off deals as in 2024’s Black Friday weekend. While list prices on some products went up, the promotional messaging remained almost copy-paste from last year.
Adobe’s data in electronics and home categories shows the same pattern:
•Electronics: Peak discount 29% vs 30.1% in 2024
•Toys: Peak discounts 30% vs 28% last year
•Televisions: 24.3% vs 24.2%
•Furniture: Flat at 19%
CI&T’s Minkow sums it up: Black Friday discount levels were essentially what retailers have been offering all year.
For shoppers, that means two things:
1.Less urgency – If “Black Friday” pricing is similar to what you’ve already seen multiple times in 2025, there’s little reason to rush.
2.More skepticism – Consumers increasingly recognize that “50% OFF” may be anchored to an inflated list price, not genuine incremental value.
For retailers, the implication is clear: promotional fatigue is real, and blunt percentage-off messaging is losing its power.
Buy Now, Pay Later: A Helpful Crutch or Future Risk?
Short-term financing continued to climb, highlighting both the resilience and fragility of consumer spending.
Adobe Analytics reports that buy now, pay later (BNPL) usage on Black Friday:
•Grew 8.9% year over year.
•Drove $747.5 million in online spend.
•Was used predominantly on mobile, which accounted for 80.7% of BNPL usage versus desktop.
Cohen characterizes consumer behavior this way: people might buy fewer gifts, but they will still spend as much as they can, deferring the real pain into 2026 when payments come due.
From a storetechnews viewpoint:
•BNPL is now a structural part of the checkout stack, especially on mobile.
•Retailers see a short-term conversion and ticket-size benefit.
•The macro risk: if too many consumers hit the wall on repayment, there could be a post-holiday hangover that dampens spending in 2026.
For product and payments teams, the focus will increasingly shift from simply offering BNPL to monitoring the health of BNPL-dependent cohorts and building retention strategies that don’t rely solely on more credit.
Store Traffic: A Mixed, Fragmented Picture
Store traffic data tells a nuanced story, depending on who you ask and what segment you look at.
On one side, RetailNext — tracking tens of thousands of U.S. stores across hundreds of brands through its smart store platform — reports that in-store traffic on Black Friday fell 3.6% compared with 2024.
Joe Shasteen, RetailNext’s global manager of advanced analytics, argues the real headline isn’t the drop itself, but what it confirms:
•The era of the impulse holiday spree is ending.
•Consumers treat Black Friday as just one touchpoint in a longer, value-driven journey.
On the other side, AI retail insights firm Passby analyzed 53 million visits and found that overall U.S. store traffic rose 1.17% year over year. Category dynamics, however, diverged:
•Health and beauty saw a drop in visits.
•Department stores performed strongly.
Taken together, the message is that foot traffic is fragmenting:
•Some formats (department stores with strong promo and experience layers) still attract crowds.
•Others (especially in more narrowly focused categories like health and beauty) are seeing shoppers shift online or delay purchases.
For retailers investing in store technology — from traffic analytics to smart shelving and digital signage — 2025’s Black Friday underscores the need to optimize per-visit value, not just count raw footfall.
What Black Friday 2025 Signals for Retail Tech in 2026
Looking ahead, Black Friday 2025 reveals several key trends that will shape retail and retail tech strategy in 2026:
1.AI Becomes a Front-Line Channel, Not a Side Project
•AI agents are now influencing traffic, discovery, conversion, and service at scale.
•Retailers need clear strategies for AI integration, data quality, and measurement — or risk ceding visibility to better-structured competitors.
2.Discounts Alone Are a Weak Differentiator
•With discount depth flat and messaging repetitive, promotional noise is drowning out signal.
•Differentiation will come from exclusive perks, experiences, and personalized offers, not multiweek “up to 50% off” banners.
3.Consumer Financial Stress Is Being Masked by Credit
•BNPL growth and higher average prices point to a consumer who is stretching, not thriving.
•Retailers and fintech partners must prepare for a scenario where delinquencies and fatigue catch up in 2026.
4.Black Friday Is Now a Season, Not a Day
•Measurement, merchandising, and marketing should shift from a single-day hero metric to multi-week, omnichannel performance views.
•Tech stacks that unify online, in-store, AI, and payments data will have a decisive advantage in understanding true ROI.
Black Friday 2025 didn’t deliver the kind of explosive, feel-good growth that hides structural issues. Instead, it exposed them — and highlighted how central AI, financial tools, and in-store experience have become in modern retail.
For retailers, the question moving into 2026 isn’t “How do we do more Black Friday?”
It’s “How do we build a year-round engine where AI, pricing, and experience work together — and Black Friday is just one of the checkpoints?”
Source: Based on reporting from Retail Dive