Online holiday sales spiked in 2025, data from ecommerce platform providers indicates, with consumer spending topping a quarter of a trillion dollars in the U.S.
During the 2025 holiday season, from Nov. 1 through Dec. 31, online sales in the U.S. reached $257.8 billion. That’s 6.8% growth compared to $241.4 billion in the same period of 2024, according to Adobe Analytics.
Meanwhile, data from the cloud services and ecommerce platform provider Salesforce indicates U.S. ecommerce sales in that period reached $294 billion (4% growth).
“This 2025 holiday season, consumers embraced generative AI more than ever as a shopping assistant in their purchasing decisions,” said Vivek Pandya, lead analyst at Adobe Digital Insights, in a statement. “Competitive discounts and flexible payment options like Buy Now Pay Later [BNPL] also contributed to driving record spend of $257.8 billion throughout this holiday season.”
Three merchandise categories drove more than half of ecommerce growth in those two months, Adobe found:
- Electronics (which generated $59.8 billion in online retail sales, an 8.2% increase)
- Apparel ($49.0 billion, up 7.4% year over year)
- Furniture ($31.1 billion, up 6.6%)
Other categories with at least 7% year-over-year growth:
- Groceries ($23.7 billion, up 10.2%)
- Cosmetics ($8.4 billion, up 9.3%)
- Toys ($8.8 billion, up 7.8%).
- Sporting goods ($8.4 billion, up 7.7%)
Adobe Analytics said it bases its data on more than 1 trillion visits to U.S. retail sites, 100 million SKUs and 18 product categories. 215 online retailers in the Top 2000 use Adobe Analytics for their web analytics, and 106 use it for site design and development. Top 1000 online retailers also use it for content delivery and management, as an ecommerce platform, a marketing platform, for personalization and more.
Total online spending during the 2025 holiday season
Global ecommerce sales during the 2025 holiday season reached $1.29 trillion. That’s a new record by Salesforce’s metrics; it also marks 7% growth from $1.2 trillion.
In the last two weeks of December, global ecommerce sales increased 12% year over year, according to Salesforce. At the same time, U.S. ecommerce sales increased 9% year over year.
In 2025, there were 25 days in which U.S. consumers spent a combined $4 billion online during the holiday season, according to Adobe.
That’s 10 more days than in 2024 (consumers had spent $4 billion in ecommerce sales on 15 different days). In 2023, consumer spending reached that mark on 11 days.
And of the $257.8 billion in total holiday-season online sales, consumers completed 56.4% of transactions on smartphones. That compares to a 54.5% share for mobile commerce in 2024, Adobe found.
It indicated that the share of mobile sales was highest on two key holidays:
- Christmas Day, when it reached 66.5% (versus 65% in 2024)
- Thanksgiving Day, when it reached 61.6% (versus 59.3% in 2024)
Additionally, more than half of U.S. online sales during the 2025 holiday season occurred between Nov. 1 and Dec. 1. During that time, U.S. consumers spent $137.4 billion online.
Within that one-month period, about a third of U.S. ecommerce sales (32.2%) came from the Cyber 5 — the five-day period of Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday — based on Adobe data.
In the context of the full 2025 holiday season, the Cyber 5 accounted for less than a fifth of U.S. ecommerce sales — 17.1%. That’s about the same as in 2024, when Cyber 5 sales represented 17% of holiday ecommerce sales.
AI’s role in 2025 holiday ecommerce sales
Generative AI-powered chat services and browsers accounted for 693.4% more traffic to retailers’ websites in the 2025 holiday season than the previous year’s comparable period, according to Adobe.
Salesforce data found that agents and other AI tools influenced more than 20% of all retail sales globally during the 2025 holiday season. Agents and AI overall generated $262 billion in ecommerce revenue in the last two months of the year, Salesforce said.
And consumers used agentic AI 66% more in December than in November, according to Salesforce. It found that consumers’ interactions with agentic AI increased 12% year over year during Christmas week.
It also found that shoppers who reached retailers’ websites through AI-powered search channels such as ChatGPT converted on sales nine times more than those who arrived through social media referrals. Furthermore, Salesforce data indicates that retailers using their own AI agents grew sales at a rate 59% faster than their counterparts. Those retailers with their own AI agents increased sales, on average, by 7.2% year over year. That compares with 3.9% for retailers not using their own agentic AI technology (or any at all).
Caila Schwartz, director of consumer insights at Salesforce, said in a statement that the 2025 holiday season “marked a definitive shift to a new era of ‘agentic’ shopping.”
“While shoppers remained resilient in the face of higher prices, the real story was how retailers leaned on AI and agents to navigate the holiday rush,” Schwartz said. “Agents didn’t just drive $262 billion in sales through high-intent discovery; they became the operational heroes of the season — handling a 142% surge in tasks like returns and shipping updates.”
BNPL usage rises during 2025 holiday season
U.S. consumers used buy now, pay later (BNPL) for a combined $20 billion in online spending during the full 2025 holiday season.
That’s 9.8% more (or a $1.8 billion increase) compared to the 2024 holiday season. Moreover, 82.2% of BNPL payments came from mobile devices during the 2025 holiday season, according to Adobe.
Additionally, Adobe noted that discounts propelled ecommerce growth. It found that discounts on electronics peaked at 30.9%, on average, in the 2025 holiday season. That’s up from 30.1% the prior year.
Discounts also increased, on average, for:
- Toys at 29.6% (versus 28% in 2024)
- Apparel at 25.1% (vs. 23.2%)
- Televisions at 24.3% (vs. 24.2%)
- Computers at 23.4% (vs. 22.8%)
- Sporting goods at 20.3% (vs. 19.5%)
- Appliances at 20.2% (vs. 19.2%)
Omnichannel advantages during the holiday season
Consumer use of in-store and curbside pickup has declined in the years since pandemic restrictions loosened, Digital Commerce 360 data has shown over time. However, such store-pickup options remain convenient for last-minute purchases, Adobe and Salesforce both found.
Curbside pickup usage continued to fall in 2025, to 17.1%. That compares to 17.5% in 2024 for retailers that offered the service, as well as 18.4% in 2023. Still, the percentage of consumers opting for curbside pickup peaked on Dec. 23, as was the case in 2024. However, a higher percentage of online orders included curbside pickup in 2025 (39.0%) than in 2024 (37.8%).
“A significant number of shoppers continue to find value in the fulfillment service for speed and convenience,” Adobe said. It also noted that “anxious shoppers used the service to make sure they got gifts on time.”
Salesforce data indicated that about a fifth of online orders this holiday season included buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS). That rate climbed to about a third of orders in the five days before Christmas, peaking on Dec. 22, Salesforce found (35%).
Returns from the 2025 holiday season
Adobe data indicates returns in the U.S. decreased 1.2% during the 2025 holiday season compared to the prior year.
About one in every seven returns this holiday season happened in the last six days of December, according to Adobe. In that time frame — the days after Christmas — returns increased 4.7% year over year, Adobe found.
“While shoppers have embraced smaller screens to transact, they are relying on desktop devices to make returns,” Adobe said in a statement.
Despite 56.4% of overall spending coming from mobile during the 2025 holiday season, consumers facilitated just 38.8% of returns on those devices, Adobe said.
Globally, Salesforce found that more than $181 billion in purchases that consumers made during the 2025 holiday season have already been returned. That accounts for 14% of all purchases, as well as 10% more than the prior year.
Salesforce added that the items consumers purchased in the last four days before Christmas were the ones they were most likely to return in January.
Click here to read last year’s update on holiday-season ecommerce sales.
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