Black Friday Set a Record Even As In-Person Sales Slumped

U.S. shoppers spent a record number online this Black Friday, even as in-store sales were lackluster.

Americans spent a record $11.8 billion shopping online on Nov. 28, according to data from Adobe Analytics. The numbers were up 9.1% from 2024 and were slightly above the $11.7 billion the company had initially forecast in October.

The number is excluding the height of e-commerce deals, Cyber Monday, which Adobe is expecting will attract more than $14 billion in consumer spending. That means we could have another record sales day in sight. With the way things are going, Adobe said that it expects the 2025 holiday season to be “the first quarter trillion-dollar holiday season.”

Between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. on Friday, online shoppers reportedly spent a whopping $12.5 million every minute.

“The record spending yesterday shows that Black Friday has cemented its role as a major e-commerce moment, as more shoppers opt to stay home and take advantage of deals,” Adobe said on Saturday, per Forbes.

The record sales were driven “in large part by competitive deals across categories like electronics, toys, and apparel,” Adobe Digital Insights lead analyst Vivek Pandya told Forbes.

Salesforce also conducted its own study, and their online sales estimates were even higher. The company shared in its report that American online shoppers spent $18 billion on Black Friday, up 3% from last year. Globally, Salesforce said that online shoppers spent $78.9 billion.

Helping, at least partially, to get those numbers up to record highs are AI shopping tools. According to Adobe, traffic to retail websites from AI rose 805% from last year’s Black Friday, although its uncertain how much of that traffic translated to a purchase. Salesforce, which has its own AI agents geared towards retailers, claimed that $3 billion in Black Friday sales were thanks to AI agents, per Reuters.

Agentic AI has been the latest trend in corporate AI initiatives, and companies are betting that AI agents that do your shopping for you will be the future of commerce. A slew of companies unveiled AI shopping assistants since Black Friday 2024, from Walmart’s Sparky to Google’s AI Mode shopping, Amazon’s Buy for Me, or ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout feature for Etsy. OpenAI also announced on Monday that it is rolling out a new feature for the holiday season in which a quiz-style interface will pop up every time you ask ChatGPT for shopping advice.

Online sales are soaring, and they have been crushing the traditional in-store Black Friday experience for some time now. CNBC reported on Friday that online Black Friday sales have topped in-store receipts for the last six years, and foot traffic hasn’t scaled up significantly since a post-Covid spike.

The preliminary data so far shows that trend continuing this year, as foot traffic in physical stores this Black Friday is allegedly down from 2024. Per NBC, RetailNext measures that Black Friday foot traffic fell 3.6% compared to 2024, while Sensormatic Solutions found that it was down 2.1%.

Even though the numbers change from study to study, there is increasingly one uniform picture emerging: Black Friday is no longer the shopping experience that it once was. Gone are the days of shoppers waking up at the crack of dawn to line up outside of malls for hours on end to get a shot at exclusive flash sales. Instead, it is becoming a day of scrolling on your laptop and, supposedly, getting referred to deals by ChatGPT.