Black Friday 2025 was the biggest on record by every measure that gets published, and the sources broadly agree with each other. Here are the figures that stood up to checking, with the source next to each one, followed by what we think they mean for anyone selling a product this November.
The headline numbers
$11.8 billion spent online in the United States on Black Friday, up 9.1% on 2024 — the first time the day cleared $11 billion (Adobe Analytics).
$14.25 billion on Cyber Monday, up 7.1%, the largest single day of US e-commerce ever recorded. Between 8pm and 10pm shoppers spent $16 million a minute (Adobe).
$44.2 billion across the five days from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday, up 7.7% (Adobe).
$336.6 billion spent globally during Cyber Week (25 November to 1 December), up 7%, with the US accounting for $79.6 billion (Salesforce Shopping Index).
203 million Americans shopped over the long weekend, a record, against the NRF's own forecast of 186.9 million. Online shoppers rose 9% to 134.9 million; in-store rose 3% to 129.5 million (National Retail Federation).
£3.8 billion spent online in the UK across the four days from Black Friday to Cyber Monday, up 4.6% (Adobe Analytics UK, via FashionNetwork).
One caveat on the growth rates: the numbers are not inflation-adjusted, and average selling prices rose about 6% year on year according to Salesforce while global order volume grew only 2%. A meaningful slice of the "growth" is people paying more per item, not buying more items.
Black Friday is now the bigger growth day
Cyber Monday still takes more money in total, but Black Friday grew faster for the second year running (9.1% against 7.1%). Adobe's explanation is that retailers pulled their most competitive offers forward, so shoppers no longer wait for Monday. Salesforce's global split points the same way: $79 billion on Black Friday against $53 billion on Cyber Monday.
For a small vendor the practical reading is simple. Your best offer should be live by Friday morning at the latest. Holding something back for Monday is a strategy from a different decade.
Mobile crossed the line for good
Salesforce put 70% of global orders on mobile devices. Adobe measured 57.5% of Cyber Monday revenue on mobile and 61.6% on Thanksgiving Day, the first time a day crossed 60%. If your checkout has not been tested on a phone with one thumb, that is the single highest-value hour you can spend before November.
The AI referral is real, from a small base
The most quoted statistic of the season was that traffic to US retail sites from generative AI sources rose 805% year on year on Black Friday (Adobe), and 670% on Cyber Monday. Salesforce claims AI and agents "influenced" $67 billion, or one in five orders, globally.
Treat those two figures differently. The Adobe number is a measured referral source that grew from a small base — it is still a low single-digit share of visits. The Salesforce number is an attribution model that counts personalised recommendations and chat, and it is measured across Salesforce's own customers. What both say is that shoppers are increasingly arriving with a shortlist that a model helped them build. Being findable and accurately described matters more than it did.
Loyalty beat discounting
Klaviyo, which sits inside the email stack of a large share of independent online stores, reported consumer spending among its merchants up 11% while average discounts fell 10% (Klaviyo). Its merchants sent 22.7 billion messages over the five days, more than 6 billion on Black Friday alone, and automated flows — welcome, abandoned cart, browse abandonment — continued to earn several times the revenue per recipient of blast campaigns.
The lesson is not "discount less". It is that the audience you built before November did the work. A store with a list and a working abandoned-cart flow converted; a store that relied on the size of its discount to be noticed did not.
What it means if you sell software or a digital product
Most of the money above went on headphones, consoles and fridges. But the mechanics transfer:
Go live early and keep the offer stable through Monday. Shoppers now expect the best price on Friday.
Assume the buyer is on a phone. Pricing pages with wide tables collapse badly on mobile.
Write a product page a language model can summarise correctly: plain statement of what it does, who it is for, and the price.
Build the list now. Two months of newsletter signups is worth more than any discount depth on the day.
Do not lie about discounts. The UK's average across all categories was 16.7%; shoppers are calibrated, and a fake "was" price is the fastest way to lose them.
Black Friday 2026 falls on 27 November. We will be tracking the same sources again and publishing what holds up.