Holiday Ecommerce Hit a Record $257.8B — the real Numbers

Holiday ecommerce statistics for 2026 planning start with one confirmed fact: US consumers spent a record $257.8 billion online during the 2025 holiday season (November 1 to December 31), up 6.8% year over year, according to Adobe Analytics. That figure beat Adobe’s own pre-season forecast — and it is only one of three headline totals reported for the same season.

The problem with most “holiday stats” roundups is that they pick the biggest-sounding number and present it as the holiday total. Adobe says $257.8 billion. Salesforce says $1.29 trillion globally and $294 billion in the US. The National Retail Federation says total US holiday retail topped $1 trillion. All three are correct at once — because each one measures a different thing.

This guide lays out the confirmed 2025 season from all three sources, makes the scope differences explicit, flags which figures are vendor-stated versus independently confirmed, and closes with the one forward-looking projection worth citing for 2026. Every stat below carries a named source and a publication date. Read it as a reference for the numbers you can actually stand behind.

Adobe Analytics reported that US consumers spent $257.8 billion online across the 2025 holiday season, up 6.8% year over year and a new ecommerce record. The measurement is built on Adobe’s analysis of over one trillion visits to US retail sites, 100 million SKUs, and 18 product categories. It is a vendor-stated figure — Adobe sells the analytics platform behind the report — but it was independently echoed in coverage from outlets such as Retail Dive and Forbes off the same release.

Two things make the number more interesting than the press-release superlative. First, it beat Adobe’s own pre-season forecast: back in October 2025, Adobe projected $253.4 billion at 5.3% growth, so the actual came in $4.4 billion and 1.5 percentage points higher. Second — and this is the part most roundups skip — the growth rate is decelerating. The 2024 season grew 8.7% YoY to $241.4 billion; 2025 grew only 6.8%. Every year’s recap calls that year “a record,” which is trivially true and tells you far less than the trendline does.

When a headline says the holiday season “hit $1.29 trillion” and another says “$257.8 billion,” they are not contradicting each other — they are measuring different things. Adobe tracks direct US online transactions. Salesforce extrapolates a global figure across 1.5 billion-plus shoppers in 89-plus countries. The NRF, via the CNBC/NRF Retail Monitor, counts total US retail spending across both online and physical stores. The table below lays out what each report actually captures so you can pick the right one for the claim you are making.

The five-day Cyber Week — Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday — brought in $44.2 billion online, up 7.7% YoY. Cyber Monday alone hit $14.25 billion, up 7.1% and what Adobe called the biggest online shopping day of all time (a superlative valid as of its December 2, 2025 report, for the metric Adobe tracks). During its 8–10 pm ET peak, shoppers spent $16 million every minute. Black Friday grew faster than Cyber Monday, up 9.1% to $11.8 billion, as deal-hunting shifted earlier in the weekend.

Shopper counts corroborate the spend. The NRF, using Prosper Insights survey data, reported a record 202.9 million consumers shopped over the five-day Thanksgiving-to-Cyber-Monday weekend. Black Friday remained the single biggest day for both channels combined — 80.3 million in-store and 85.7 million online shoppers — with Cyber Monday the number-two online day at 75.9 million. For a channel-by-channel plan built on these patterns, our Q4 2026 peak-season prep playbook maps the calendar to inventory and ad-spend decisions.

How consumers paid and collected orders shifted again in 2025. Mobile devices handled 56.4% of online transactions — a third straight year of gains, up from 54.5% in 2024 and 51.1% in 2023 — and peaked at 66.5% on Christmas Day, the classic on-the-couch shopping moment. Buy Now Pay Later hit a season record of $20 billion, up 9.8% YoY (an increase of $1.8 billion over 2024’s $18.2 billion), with 82.2% of it transacted on a smartphone. All of these BNPL figures are Adobe Analytics checkout data aggregated across providers, not any single lender’s reporting.

The BNPL milestone is the concrete story here: a $20 billion season and a $1 billion single day are the kind of thresholds that only get crossed once. If you are weighing whether to add a pay-later option to your own checkout, we break down the merchant economics in our BNPL decision matrix for merchants.

Of the $257.8 billion online total, three categories accounted for 54% of it: electronics ($59.8 billion, +8.2% YoY), apparel ($49.0 billion, +7.4%), and furniture ($31.1 billion, +6.6%). Groceries were the fastest-growing major category at $23.7 billion, up 10.2% — a reminder that holiday ecommerce is no longer just gifts and gadgets.

Discount depth did real work. Electronics peaked at 30.9% off (up from 30.1% in 2024) and toys at 29.6% (up from 28.0%). Crucially, deeper discounts pushed consumers to trade up: the share of units sold in the most expensive price tier rose 20% season-wide versus the rest of the year — and jumped 56% within electronics, 55% in sporting goods, and 38% in appliances. Shoppers used the markdowns to buy the better model, not just the cheaper one. Returns, meanwhile, fell 1.2% for the season but spiked 4.7% in the December 26–31 window, when roughly one in seven of all season returns landed.

One channel worth watching: social media’s share of ecommerce revenue rose to 4.6% (up 40.3% YoY from 3.3% in 2024), and affiliates and partners — including social influencers — reached a 20.4% revenue share. If social selling is on your 2026 roadmap, our TikTok Shop social-commerce playbook and our social media marketing services cover the build-out.

The season’s defining new signal was generative AI as a shopping assistant. Traffic to US retail sites referred from AI tools — a shopper clicking through from an AI chat or browser to a retailer — rose 693.4% YoY season-wide, and 670% on Cyber Monday alone. The important qualifier, which Adobe itself flags: the AI-referred base is still modest in absolute terms. Cite the growth rate, not an implied market-share claim. Salesforce, measuring its own platform, attributes 20% of all global retail sales to AI and agents, fueling $262 billion in revenue — a vendor-stated, platform-specific attribution, not an independently audited figure.

What makes the AI number a useful lesson is that Adobe under-forecast it. Its October 2025 outlook projected AI-referred traffic to grow 520% for the season; the actual 693.4% came in well above that. In fact, every headline Adobe metric beat its own pre-season call — a reason to treat forecasts as a floor, not a ceiling. The table below recomputes the gaps.

Part of running a stats post honestly is naming the claims that circulate without a date or a scope. These are the “zombie stats” — technically defensible the day they were said, then recycled forever as timeless facts. Here are three we saw repeated during research and chose to reframe rather than restate.

The one forward figure worth citing is a projection, not an actual. eMarketer’s February 23, 2026 outlook forecasts US holiday retail growth of roughly 2.6% overall and 6.6% for ecommerce specifically — broadly similar to 2025’s rates, not an acceleration. Treat it as a planning baseline: steady growth, continued channel shift, and no reason to assume a surge. eMarketer also flags TikTok Shop as a fast-growing channel outside Amazon and Walmart, citing roughly $500 million in GMV over the 2025 Black Friday–Cyber Monday weekend, and names AI shopping assistants becoming mainstream as the trend to prepare for.

The through-line for 2026 planning is that the growth is steady, the channel mix keeps shifting toward mobile and social, and the genuinely new variable is AI-assisted shopping — small today, worth preparing for now. For the wider dataset behind this season, see our full 2026 ecommerce statistics roundup. And if you want a partner to turn these numbers into a peak-season plan, our ecommerce growth services do exactly that.