Tariff burdens, a Shopify shutdown, and the biggest Cyber Monday ever. Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) 2025 rewrote its own rules to not only become Black November, but break every sales record on the weekend that mattered most. Here are the numbers, shifting shopping trends, and hottest products that made up Black Friday 2025.
After some trepidation around the impact of import duties, the state of discounts and shoppers minding their wallets, the results for shopping’s biggest weekend were resoundingly in the black. Shopify reported $14.6 billion in global sales over the 4-day BFCM period, and 27% increase from last year. From November 1 to December 1, Adobe Analytics had tracked total season spend at $137.4 billion, a 7.1% increase year-over-year, and revealed that apparel sales make up $47.6 billion of the total season spend so far, up 2% year-over-year.
For Black Friday itself, Shopify merchants hit $6.2 billion in gross merchandise volume on the day, up 25% year-over-year, while Adobe Analytics clocked $11.8 billion in sales, a whole 9.3% increase on 2024. Adobe found the average apparel discount on Black Friday reached an average low of around 24% off, while spending on Thanksgiving and Black Friday both came in above Adobe’s initial forecasts.
But it was Cyber Monday results that took the win, with shoppers spending a staggering $17.3 billion online on the Monday, according to Salesforce data, while Adobe reported a 14.25 billion-dollar day, a 7% increase on last year’s data.
The day was not without its drama; Shopify stock fell on Cyber Monday amid a partial outage impacting the company's e-commerce network. The outage left some merchants unable to handle transactions, had issues logging in, and had trouble with point-of-sale systems. Here’s an idea of what Shopify was dealing with: according to the company, the platform’s infrastructure processed 2.2 trillion edge requests and served 90 petabytes of data. Performance peaked at 489 million requests per minute on edge and more than 117 million requests per minute on app servers.
For the remainder of the holiday shopping season, Adobe Analytics forecasts $253.4 billion in global spending from November 1 through to December 31, a 5.3% increase on last year, with Cyber Monday to lead the 61 days with the highest forecasted spend. In the US, the National Retail Federation is forecasting holiday sales will grow between 3.7% and 4.2% above last year’s holiday season, to exceed $1 trillion in holiday season sales for the first time.
BFCM results snapshot
Shopify results
- $14.6 billion in global sales* from merchants, a 27% increase YoY
- 81+ million consumers** worldwide bought from Shopify-powered brands
- More than 94,900 merchants had their highest-selling day ever on Shopify
- Average cart price: $114.70 ($112.29 on a constant currency basis)
- Top selling countries: US, UK, Australia, Germany, Canada
- Top selling cities: Los Angeles, New York, London, San Francisco, Miami
- Peak sales per minute: $5.1 million at 12:01 PM EST on Black Friday
- Cross-border orders represented 16% of all global orders
Shopify hottest categories
- Cosmetics
- Clothing tops & pants
- Activewear
- Fitness & nutrition
Adobe results
- Black Friday: $11.8 B
- Cyber Monday: $14.25 B
- Nov 1 to Dec 1 spend: $137.4B + 7.1% YOY
- Nov 1 to Dec 1 Mobile spend: $73.7B + 7.2% YOY
- Nov 1 to Dec 1 BNPL spend: $10.1B + 9.0% YOY
Adobe hottest products
- Labubu Dolls
- iPhone 17
- Oura Ring
- Nintendo Switch 2
- Pajamas and lounge wear
BFCM Trends
Retailers pull back on discounts
The decision to discount carried more weight than usual this year, with many retailers already affected by tight margins caused by tariffs and inflation, or having revised their pricing strategies to maintain brand integrity in a tougher economy.
Coach is just one of the brands to minimize the frequency and depth of discounting intentionally around Black Friday. CEO Todd Kahn told Bloomberg News, “While promotional activity continues in parts of the market, we’ve deliberately moved away from deep discounting over the past several years.” Meanwhile, Nike, Levi’s, and Ralph Lauren have adopted similar strategies that look to reduce or phase out promotions and keep products exclusive. Brands including Aligne, Patagonia, ME+EM, and Veja continued to boycott the BFCM sales weekend, in an effort to uphold brand value around sustainability and overconsumption.
On the tariff front, Salesforce revealed the newly imposed duties on US imports contributed to an increase in spending on Black Friday, with average selling prices up 7% year-over-year, and order volumes down 1%.
“Black Friday delivered an important signal for the US economy,” Caila Schwartz, Director of Consumer Insights at Salesforce, told Forbes. “On the surface, sales were strong, hitting $18 billion, a 3% jump year-over-year. But with the average selling price for goods climbing 7%, US shoppers continued to feel the bite of inflation."
The impulse shopping spree is over
In reaction to tariffs, inflation, and retailers wary of discounts, consumers had already begun to revise their own shopping strategies – looking for the best discounts at the best value, whether that lands on the BFCM weekend or not. The longer Black November-style shopping allows consumers to split their purchases across a larger period, rather than relying on a single day to splurge on deals.
Salesforce had anticipated shoppers to start their Christmas shopping early, predicting that consumers would use AI-driven shopping-related prompts to plan their purchases about three weeks before Thanksgiving.
Joe Shasteen, RetailNext’s global manager of advanced analytics, confirmed this sentiment, telling Forbes, “We’re seeing a consumer who is still spending, but doing it with surgical precision. They’re waiting for the right price, stretching purchases across a longer promo window, and walking into stores with a far narrower mission than we’ve seen in past holiday seasons.”
AI takes center stage
Salesforce predicted AI agents would unleash billions for brands, with many consumers prompting ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and other tools to research products, uncover the latest trends, find discounts, and explore gift ideas. Salesforce had anticipated that 22% of all global sales would be influenced by AI and agents during Cyber Week, which is a significant increase from $60 billion in 2024.
In fact, both Salesforce and Adobe saw a surge in AI-driven traffic to e-commerce sites on Black Friday, with Adobe reporting that AI traffic to U.S. retail sites was up by 805% compared to the previous Black Friday. Salesforce reported that $14.2 billion in global online sales and $3 billion in U.S. online sales were driven by AI agents on Black Friday. In comparison, retail intelligence and traffic analytics company RetailNext reported that Black Friday in-store traffic was down 3.6% nationwide compared to 2024.
With another BFCM under the belt, the results and shifting trends might be tell-tale signs for fashion retailing in 2026; consumers favouring value-driven discounts over spending sprees, shopping assistance via AI agents, and making strategic plans to complete purchases that they really, really want.
Were you stuck in spreadsheets with little-to-no visibility across your Black Friday SKUs or numbers?
