By Tiffany Williams –
Consumers smashed online spending records this Black Friday, but the story on Main Street is a lot messier.
Adobe’s tracking machine—armed with data from more than a trillion visits—says Americans blew past expectations with $11.8 billion in ecommerce purchases, a 9.1% jump from last year and even hotter than Adobe’s 8.3% growth forecast. And during the late-morning rush, shoppers were torching their digital wallets at a blistering $12.5 million per minute, according to Adobe.
Salesforce, tapping into 1.5 billion global shoppers, paints the same blistering online picture: $79 billion in worldwide Black Friday sales, up 6%, and $18 billion in the U.S., up 3%.
The AI stampede was unmistakable. Adobe says AI-driven traffic to U.S. retail sites exploded 805% over last year’s Black Friday. Salesforce says AI agents were responsible for $14.2 billion in global online sales and $3 billion in the U.S.
But tariffs are taking a bite. Salesforce points to a 7% year-over-year jump in average selling prices and a 1% drop in order volumes—consumers paying more while buying less.
Pass_by insists the opposite after analyzing 53 million store visits—claiming traffic rose 1.17%, with department stores surging 7.9%, which it credits to shoppers rediscovering the charm of one-stop buying.
And then there’s brick-and-mortar retail, the old-school battleground where most holiday budgets still get blown. The problem? No one agrees on what happened.
RetailNext says national in-store traffic fell 3.6% from last year.
The real verdict won’t drop until traditional retailers unload their fourth-quarter numbers in early 2026. Until then, the only thing clear about Black Friday is that the digital world crushed it—while the physical one is still arguing about the score.