Adobe on September 28, 2026 forecast that US consumers will spend $275.1 billion on retail websites between November 1 and December 31, adding $17.3 billion to the previous season, with Cyber Monday expected to become the first day in which American online sales pass $15 billion.

In Short

Adobe, which measures visits to US shopping websites through its analytics software, expects Americans to spend about $17 billion more online this November and December than they did a year earlier. That matters for retailers and advertisers because more of the money is arriving through phones, pay-later plans, influencer links and AI chat tools, while classic search ads grow more slowly. Cyber Monday is expected to stay the biggest day, Black Friday is expected to grow faster, and the discounts you see are forecast to look much like last year's rather than deeper.

A season of steady, unspectacular growth

According to Adobe, the forecast rests on Adobe Analytics data covering more than 1 trillion visits to US retail sites, 100 million SKUs and 18 product categories. The company describes the result as "the most comprehensive view into U.S. e-commerce", a claim it grounds in the measurement of direct online transactions rather than consumer surveys. Adobe also states that its dataset is larger than that of "any other technology company or research organization."

The projected growth rate of 6.7% sits almost exactly on the 6.8% that Adobe's own historical series records for 2025, when online holiday sales reached $257.8 billion. That series, published as a chart alongside the forecast, tells a story of normalisation. Spending rose 13.1% in 2019 to $142.5 billion, jumped 32.1% in the first pandemic season of 2020 to $188.2 billion, and has since moved within a narrow band: 8.7% in 2021, 3.5% in 2022, 4.9% in 2023, 8.7% in 2024 and 6.8% in 2025. If the 2026 figure holds, US online holiday spending will have grown 93% in seven seasons.

A revised 2024 baseline

One number in the chart does not match what Adobe said at the time. Adobe's 2024 season results gave a full-season total of $240.8 billion, up 8.4%. The new chart puts 2024 at $241.4 billion, up 8.7%. The $600 million gap is small against a quarter-trillion-dollar market, and the release offers no explanation for it. Adobe's disclaimer states that the company "has no responsibility to update or revise information presented herein", yet the historical series has evidently been revised. Because every year-on-year comparison in the forecast depends on the prior-year base, the change is worth noting rather than ignoring.

Five days, $47.5 billion

Cyber Week, the five days from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday, is forecast to generate $47.5 billion, up 7.4% and equal to 17.3% of the season, according to Adobe. In 2026 that window runs from Thursday, November 26 to Monday, November 30, which means the whole stretch falls inside November. In 2025, Cyber Monday landed on December 1. The season total is unaffected, since Adobe measures November 1 to December 31 in both years, but any monthly comparison will be distorted by the shift.

Cyber Monday remains the largest day, at $15.1 billion, up 6.2%. Black Friday follows at $12.9 billion, growing faster at 9.2%. Thanksgiving is forecast at $6.9 billion, up 8.5%. Subtracting those three days from the Cyber Week total leaves roughly $12.6 billion for the Saturday and Sunday combined.

Black Friday is closing the gap. Adobe's 2024 figures put Cyber Monday at $13.3 billion and Black Friday at $10.8 billion; the Friday was then worth 81% of the Monday. On the 2026 forecast, the ratio rises to 85%. Adobe gives two slightly different explanations for the acceleration. The release's summary attributes it to earlier discounts, while the body text credits Black Friday having the biggest discounts for categories such as TVs, apparel and appliances. As the discount section below shows, peak markdowns in all three of those categories are forecast to be marginally shallower than in 2025.

Where the money goes

Electronics, at $63.3 billion (up 5.9%), and apparel, at $51.3 billion (up 4.7%), remain the two largest categories, representing 23% and 18.6% of the season respectively, according to Adobe. Both are growing below the market average. The faster growth sits elsewhere: furniture at $33.4 billion (up 7.3%), grocery at $26.1 billion (up 10.3%), toys at $9.6 billion (up 9.6%) and cosmetics at $9.2 billion (up 9.5%).

Together those six categories account for $192.9 billion, or roughly 70% of the forecast. The arithmetic of growth is instructive. Grocery, at half the size of apparel, is set to add about $2.4 billion in sales against apparel's $2.3 billion, based on the growth rates Adobe supplied. Electronics adds the most in absolute terms, at roughly $3.5 billion.

Essentials in the holiday basket

A notable part of the release concerns everyday goods rather than gifts. During Cyber Week, Adobe expects online sales of personal hygiene products to rise 150% and clothing basics 210%, with baby products up 113%, pet products up 93% and household cleaning items up 49%.

Those percentages are not year-on-year growth rates. They compare Cyber Week sales with average sales levels in September 2026, a month that had not finished when the forecast was published on September 28. The release does not say whether the baseline was measured in full or partly projected.

The pattern fits other consumer data published in recent weeks. An Adtaxi survey of more than 1,100 US adults found 40% had switched to lower-cost brands and 93% had adopted at least one cost-saving behaviour. When Google put agentic checkout into US Search in November 2025, its holiday guidance cited 61% of shoppers reporting more careful spending because of economic concerns.

October has become a second season

Adobe expects $95.8 billion to be spent online in October 2026, up 8%, a month that sits outside the November-December window used for the headline total. The October figure alone equals about 35% of the forecast holiday season. Nearly $10 billion of it ($9.9 billion, up 9.2%) is expected on October 6 and 7, during Amazon's October event, with discounts forecast to peak at 19% off listed price.

"This has changed the shape of the holiday season," Adobe wrote, arguing that retailers now have to manage promotions and inventory to capture an additional pre-season spike.

Adobe dates the October event to 2021. That does not match the event's recorded history: Prime Big Deal Days, which Amazon scheduled for October 6-7 across 22 countries, dates back to October 2022. The release does not clarify whether Adobe counts an earlier cross-retailer promotional period as the starting point.

The calendar around it has also moved. Amazon ran its main Prime Day from June 23 to 26, 2026 across 26 countries, where CommerceIQ recorded US ad spend falling 8.8% while unit conversion rose 17.1%. The result is three distinct peaks in the second half of the year, all of which Amazon treats as high velocity events: June, October and late November.

Discounts: deep, but no deeper

Adobe expects discounts to reach up to 30% off listed price during Cyber Week. Earlier in the season, the company forecasts markdowns of up to 14% in early November and up to 21% just before Thanksgiving, falling to 10-15% through December.

Category by category, Adobe characterises deals as "on par" with 2025. The detail supports that description, with a slight tilt toward shallower discounts:

  • Electronics: 30%, against 30.1% in 2025
  • Toys: 29%, against 28%
  • TVs: 23%, against 24.2%
  • Computers: 23%, against 22.8%
  • Apparel: 23%, against 23.2%
  • Sporting goods: 19%, against 19.5%
  • Appliances: 18%, against 19.2%
  • Furniture: 18%, against 19%

Six of the eight named categories are forecast to peak at shallower discounts than a year earlier. Only toys and computers go deeper. The timing also varies: electronics and computers reach their deepest discounts on Cyber Monday, TVs, toys, apparel, appliances and furniture on Black Friday, and sporting goods on Thanksgiving.

The daily chart Adobe published with the forecast does not fully match the text. It plots the deepest discount at about 30% on November 30 and just under that on Black Friday, consistent with the release. But through the first nine days of December the charted line stays deeper than 15%, and it returns to about 16-17% in the final days of the year, outside the "10-15%" range the text gives for December. The difference is modest and may reflect how "throughout December" is being defined, but the two sources do not align.

All of these figures are measured against listed prices, and the release does not say how listed prices are established in Adobe's data. That matters because the reference price determines how large any discount appears. On Amazon, the benchmark itself has changed: since April 23, 2026, sellers must substantiate list prices through recent sales at that price or recent offers elsewhere, or lose strike-through pricing.

Phones carry the season

Mobile devices are forecast to account for 57.4% of holiday spending, up from 56.4% in 2025, according to Adobe. On Thanksgiving, the mobile share is expected to reach a record 63%, up from 61.6%. Applied to the season total, the mobile share is worth roughly $158 billion.

Adobe's chart tracing mobile share since January 2019 starts at about a third of online spending. The line peaked above 55% in each of the last two holiday periods, and through 2026 it has stayed above 50% outside the holidays as well.

Adobe links the Thanksgiving figure to impulse shopping. The company's own consumer research supports that reading: Adobe data published in June 2026 found 86% of US online shoppers make at least one unplanned purchase a month. There is a tension, though, with another Adobe study from August, in which 72% of shoppers said they had installed a retail app for a single discount or purchase and then deleted it. The forecast does not split mobile spending between apps and the mobile web, so it is unclear how much of the rising share retailers capture in their own apps.

Buy Now Pay Later holds its share

Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) is expected to drive $21.3 billion in online spending across November and December, up 6.6%, according to Adobe. That is 7.7% of forecast season spend. Cyber Monday is expected to account for $1.09 billion of it, which Adobe says would be the second consecutive year above $1 billion on that day, while Black Friday is forecast at $807 million.

The growth rate is the more telling number. At 6.6%, BNPL is growing marginally slower than online spending overall, so its share of the season is essentially flat. That is a change of pace. For the 2023 season, Adobe recorded $16.6 billion in BNPL spend, up 14%, with $940 million on Cyber Monday. By Cyber Monday 2024, BNPL had reached $991.2 million.

Where BNPL does stand apart is device mix. Adobe expects 82% of BNPL spending to come through mobile devices, well above the 57.4% mobile share of all holiday spending, and attributes the gap to "the impact of impulse shopping on driving adoption of the payment method." Regulation remains unsettled: when the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau suspended supervision activity in February 2025, a proposed rule to bring BNPL under credit card-style oversight had not been implemented.

AI referrals grow, from an undisclosed base

Adobe expects traffic from AI-powered chat and browser services to US retail sites, measured by shoppers clicking a link, to rise 130% year on year over the holiday season. The largest increase is forecast for Thanksgiving, up 159%, followed by Black Friday at 95% and Cyber Monday at 88%. Adobe says it first observed an uptick in AI-assisted shopping during the 2024 season.

What the release does not disclose is the base. Without absolute visit counts or AI's share of total retail traffic, a 130% increase could describe a significant channel or a marginal one. The growth rate is also slowing sharply. For Cyber Monday 2024, Adobe measured a 1,950% increase in chatbot traffic compared with 2023. An 88% rise for the same day in 2026 suggests a channel whose early surge has passed, though its size remains unknown.

Adobe pairs the traffic data with a survey of 5,000 US consumers fielded in July 2026. Among respondents who had used AI for online shopping, 77% said they felt more confident in their purchase and 69% said they were less likely to return an item. The release does not say how many of the 5,000 fell into that group, and the figures are self-reported.

Other evidence complicates the picture. A Contentsquare survey of 2,000 consumers found only 3% would still buy after an AI recommendation led to a disappointing website, with 23% switching to a rival. And Walmart products bought through ChatGPT's Instant Checkout converted at roughly one-third the rate of click-through links to Walmart's own site.

Adobe's metric also has a structural blind spot. It counts clicks that arrive at retail websites. Transactions completed inside an AI surface, or assistants operating within a retailer's own property, fall outside it. Amazon, for example, said its Rufus assistant drove nearly $12 billion in incremental annualised sales in 2025 across more than 300 million users. Independent measurement is on its way: NIQ and Similarweb plan a first version of an AI shopping measurement product in Q4 2026, covering ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode, Perplexity and Claude.

For marketers, the channel figures may be the most consequential part of the release. Adobe measures the contribution of different marketing investments to revenue during the season. It expects the share of revenue from affiliates and partners, a category that includes social influencers, to rise 12%, and the share from social media overall to rise 17%. Paid search is expected to gain 4%.

These are relative changes in share, not percentage-point shifts. Adobe's 2024 data shows how the metric works: the affiliates and partners category held a 20.3% share of revenue on Cyber Monday 2024, up 6.8% year on year, meaning the share itself grew by that proportion. Adobe does not disclose the 2025 base shares, so the absolute size of each channel in 2026 cannot be derived from the release. Nor does it state which attribution model assigns revenue to channels, a choice that can change the picture dramatically. Billy Grace's analysis of Black Friday week 2025 found that six of nine paid channels looked loss-making under last-click attribution, while its own unified model showed view-based channels as profitable.

Within the affiliate category, cashback and rewards partners lead with a 36% share of affiliate traffic, according to Adobe, followed by influencers and creators at 22%. "For U.S. retailers, this highlights the importance of partner and social-led acquisition during the holiday season," the company wrote.

The cashback segment has come under legal pressure. In June 2026, a federal judge allowed a creators' class action against PayPal's Honey browser extension to proceed, and the extension's merchant partnerships had fallen by more than 7,000, from about 35,000 to just above 28,000. The allegations concern commission diversion at the last click, the moment at which affiliate commissions are typically credited. On the creator side, partnership platform impact.com reported creator-driven revenue up 51% during Cyber Week 2025, a vendor figure that points in the same direction as Adobe's forecast. There is a limit to what the social media figure captures, however. Because Adobe's data comes from transactions on retail websites, purchases completed inside platforms' own storefronts, a core form of social commerce, would not appear to be counted.

Does a 4% gain for paid search signal decline? Not necessarily. A rising share, however modest, in a market growing 6.7% still means more revenue attributed to search. But the gap between 4% and 17% indicates where incremental holiday revenue is being credited. Advertiser plans reflect some of this. In a Tatari survey of 41 direct-to-consumer marketers, paid search ranked fourth among holiday priorities at 60%, behind linear TV and paid social at 76% each and streaming at 73%, and one in five respondents listed LLM platforms such as ChatGPT. Cost pressure is also a factor: during Black Friday week 2025, Billy Grace recorded median CPMs rising 36%, though Google and Bing showed the smallest increases, at 22% and 25%.

The expected best sellers

Adobe also listed products it expects to sell well, without describing how the list was compiled. Consoles include Nintendo Switch 2, Sony PlayStation 5 and 5 Pro, and Xbox Series X, with Grand Theft Auto VI, Marvel's Wolverine and NBA 2K27 among the games. The toy list runs from Beyblade X and Jellycat plush to KPop Demon Hunters and Toy Story 5 toys, while other named products include AirPods Pro 3, iPhone 18 Pro, Google Pixel 11, Meta AI Glasses and Oura Ring 5.

How the forecast is built, and its limits

Adobe Analytics is part of Adobe CX Enterprise, the company's customer experience software suite, so the forecast is published by the vendor whose product generates the underlying data. The release describes the dataset but not the method used to turn observations from sites running Adobe's tools into a national total, and it provides no confidence intervals.

Adobe's own disclaimer states that the information "may contain statements about future events that could differ from actual results" and that Adobe does not warrant its accuracy. Adobe typically publishes measured results once a season closes, as it did for 2024, and the revision noted above shows that even those figures can move later.

The forecast is, in short, a well-sourced estimate from a single vendor rather than an official statistic. Whether its AI referral numbers describe a large channel or a fast-growing small one will remain unclear until Adobe, or someone else, publishes the base.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Adobe, through its Adobe Analytics product, produced the forecast. It affects US retailers, advertisers, affiliate and creator partners, payment providers and publishers that depend on holiday commerce.

What: Adobe forecasts $275.1 billion in US online spending for November and December 2026, up 6.7%, including $47.5 billion during Cyber Week, $15.1 billion on Cyber Monday and $12.9 billion on Black Friday. It also projects $95.8 billion in October, $21.3 billion in BNPL spend, a 57.4% mobile share, a 130% rise in AI referral traffic, and revenue share gains of 17% for social media, 12% for affiliates and 4% for paid search.

When: The forecast was published on September 28, 2026. It covers November 1 to December 31, 2026, with Thanksgiving on November 26, Black Friday on November 27 and Cyber Monday on November 30. The October figures cover a separate pre-season period, including October 6-7.

Where: The data covers US retail websites, based on more than 1 trillion visits, 100 million SKUs and 18 product categories.

Why: The forecast shows where holiday revenue is moving: toward Black Friday relative to Cyber Monday, toward essentials alongside gifts, toward mobile and BNPL, and toward social and affiliate channels faster than paid search. Several of its figures, including the revised 2024 baseline, the October event's start date, December discount levels and the undisclosed base for AI traffic, carry caveats that limit how precisely they can be used.