Online holiday spending hits new heights, even with Gen Z’s plans to pull back
AI helped holiday e-commerce to a new record — inflation also seems to be doing quite a lot of the lifting.
US shoppers aren’t feeling too much economic pain, if holiday shopping figures are anything to go by, with Americans spending a record $11.8 billion online on Black Friday alone, up 9% on last year. That haul could help push this year’s holiday e-commerce spending toward the projected all-time high of $253.4 billion, Adobe Analytics data shows.
Part of that rise simply reflects that this year’s stuff was more expensive than last year’s stuff, with Salesforce finding that average selling prices were up 7% year over year in the 2025 early holiday season. However, the blowout e-commerce spending so far also underscores just how much our holiday shopping habits have changed, as America turns from busting down the doors of a local big-box retailer to silently scrolling for sales.
In 2015, just 17% of American online holiday shopping happened on smartphones — a share that’s expected to hit 57% this year, per Adobe estimates. Total online spending has surged more than 3x over the same period, and now, with some shoppers turning to AI for recommendations and product discovery, that growth seems likely to continue.
Indeed, from November 1 through 28, AI-referred traffic to retail sites was up 805% from the same period last year. More than 4 in 10 consumers already use AI to shop, Mastercard found — led by 61% of Gen Z, who rely on it for recommendations, deal-checking, and filtering out bogus reviews.
Still, even if they were using AI to help them bargain hunt this Thanksgiving period, America’s youngest adult generation has planned to pull back pretty decidedly on holiday spending in 2025, per Deloitte’s Holiday Retail Survey for this year.
Young money worries
According to the expected spending figures, millennials are looking to splash about 13% less cash than they did during last year’s holiday period, while Gen Z said in late summer that they were expecting their seasonal spending to drop by more than one-third, with 62% of the cohort anxious about higher prices, a separate part of Deloitte’s report showed.
Obviously, all of this is potentially concerning for America’s retailers. As The Wall Street Journal pointed out, though the youngest generation of US adults accounts for only about 8% of retail dollars in 2025, that’s expected to rise to around 20% by the end of the decade. Getting the next generation hooked on shopping is what the season now has to be all about if you’re a big brand. Right?
