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.

12/1/25 9:55AM

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.

Adobe holiday e-commerce chart — Sherwood News

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.

Deloitte generational holiday spending — Sherwood News

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?

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Ahead of Mother’s Day, Google searches for “same day flower delivery” have ticked up a little earlier this year

If you’ve already made plans for a Mother’s Day gift in advance of this Sunday, congratulations. But if alarm bells are suddenly ringing, consider this a gentle reminder that, like a sizable share of the US population this time of year often does, you can still scrape together some last-minute flowers for the woman who carried you for nine months.

Data from Google Trends reveals that searches for “same day flower delivery” spike in the US in May every year, when Mother’s Day takes place. As we noted last February, the same query also gains traction around Valentine’s Day.

This year, however, it appears that searches for last-minute flowers have remained elevated in the last two months after the usual peak in February — with the search interest this April actually exceeding that seen around Cupid’s Day.

Honestly, we’re not sure why searches are spiking a little early. One explanation might be that Passover and Easter have overlapped at the start of April, and Americans wanted to celebrate with some flowers. Maybe it’s a host of Claude bots that are now running errands for AI-obsessed execs — or perhaps Americans are just impulse-buying some seasonal spring blooms after an unusually warm March, without a particular occasion.