Why Cyber Monday could break spending records despite economic uncertainty

 

Deals promoted as some of the best of the holiday season are expected to keep people across the United States glued to their computers and smartphones as the post-Thanksgiving shopping marathon wraps up on Cyber Monday.

It’s no secret that buying things online is now a staple of many people’s everyday routines. And year after year, those purchases mount during the gift-giving holiday rush. Experts expect consumers to drive record Cyber Monday spending this year, even amid wider economic uncertainty.

Adobe Analytics has estimated that U.S. shoppers will spend $14.2 billion online Monday, or 6.3% more than in 2024. They already spent $11.8 billion online for Black Friday and another $6.4 billion on Thanksgiving Day, exceeding Adobe’s forecasts.

Consumer spending for Cyber Week — the five major shopping days between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday — provides a strong indication of how much shoppers are willing to spend for the holidays.

“Cyber Week is off to a strong start,” Vivek Pandya, lead analyst at Adobe Digital Insights, said. “Discounts are set to remain elevated through Cyber Monday, which we expect will remain the biggest online shopping day of the season and year.”

Deals on electronics and apparel are poised to peak Monday at 30% and 26% off average listed prices, per Adobe’s latest estimates.

While the amount of money going into online shopping carts is expected to reach new heights as consumers try to get the biggest bangs for their bucks while they can, rising retail prices also may contribute to any record sales figures that materialize.

Businesses and households have watched anxiously for financial impacts from U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs on foreign imports. Workers in both the public and private sectors are also struggling with anxieties over job security amid both corporate layoffs and the after-effects of the 43-day government shutdown.

For the November-December holiday season overall, the National Retail Federation estimates that U.S. shoppers will spend more than $1 trillion for the first time this year. But the rate of growth is slowing — with an anticipated increase of 3.7% to 4.2% year over year, compared to 4.3% during last year’s holiday season.

At the same time, credit card debt and delinquencies on other short-term loans have been rising. More and more shoppers are turning to “buy now, pay later” plans, which allow them to delay payments on holiday decor, gifts and other items.

Buy now, pay later loans are expected to drive $20.2 billion in online spending this holiday season, according to Adobe, up 11% from last year. The firm predicted that buy now, pay later loans would pass a new $1 billion milestone on Cyber Monday, the vast majority involving purchases made on mobile devices.

Overall, mobile devices have become the dominant shopping platform consumers are turning to for the holidays. Adobe expects smartphones, wearable tech and other handheld electronics to account for 56.1% of online spending this season, worth a total of $142.7 billion.

Five years ago, a majority of online purchases were made on desktops.

Shopping services powered by artificial intelligence are also expected to play a role in what consumers choose to buy. Software company Salesforce estimated that AI asssitants and digital agents contributed to $14.2 billion of the total $79 billion it said was spent online worldwide on Black Friday.

Cyber Monday’s “hot sellers” will include gaming consoles such as the Nintendo Switch 2 and toys-turned-fashion statements like Labubu Dolls, Adobe said. The analystics firm anticipates the newest editions of popular consumer electronics — including the iPhone 17, Google Pixel 10 and Samsung Galaxy S25 — will also see high demand.

To many, Cyber Monday is billed as the “last call” to take advantage of the deepest discounts in the days following Thanksgiving. But its reach has grown over the years.

Cyber Monday is two decades old now, dating back to when the National Retail Federation first coined the term in 2005. Today, sales continue to bubble up throughout the week — riding on the hype that the industry has built to fuel consumer spending.

Asia's manufacturing powerhouses struggled with sluggish demand in November, extending declines in factory activity as progress in U.S. trade negotiations failed to translate into a significant recovery in orders.

A raft of purchasing managers' indexes (PMIs) on Monday showed diverging conditions across the region, with China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan all reporting declines in activity while Southeast Asian economies mostly saw growth.

In China, the world's largest manufacturer, factory activity slipped back into contraction, a private-sector PMI showed, a day after Beijing's official measure showed activity falling for the eighth consecutive month albeit at a slower pace.

"Container throughput at Chinese ports was little changed last month compared to October. To the extent that demand did improve, it didn't do much to support production amid already high inventory levels - the output component dropped to a four-month low," said Zichun Huang, China economist at Capital Economics.

"And while the output price component edged up slightly, it stayed at a low level, pointing to persistent deflationary pressures."

Across Asia this year, businesses in major exporting nations have been scrambling to navigate the uncertainty created by U.S. President Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs.

While Trump's trade deals with countries like Japan and South Korea and lowered tensions with China have given firms some confidence, many are still adjusting to the new U.S. trade reality.

Japan's PMI showed new orders continued to decline, stretching the downturn to two-and-a-half years, blamed on factors such as a sluggish global business environment, tighter client budgets and subdued capital investment.

Official data on Monday also showed Japanese corporate spending on factories and equipment rose 2.9% in July-September versus the same period a year prior, slowing from the previous quarter.

South Korea's factory activity contracted for a second month in November, though a finalised trade deal with the United States brought some clarity for manufacturers.

Separate data showed Korean exports rose in November for a sixth consecutive month, beating market expectations, as chip sales hit a record on strong technology demand while autos also jumped after a U.S. trade deal.

Taiwan's PMI showed factory activity continued to fall, but at a slower pace.

Meanwhile, Asia's emerging-market manufacturers remained outperformers with Indonesia and Vietnam both reporting brisk growth in factory activity and Malaysia swinging back to growth.

Major retail chains and tech companies are offering new or updated artificial intelligence tools in time for the holiday shopping season, hoping to give consumers an easier gift-buying experience and themselves an augmented share of online spending.

Although AI-powered purchases are in early stages, the shopping assistants and agents rolled out by the likes of Walmart, Amazon and Google can do more than the chatbots of holidays past. The latest versions were designed to provide personalized product recommendations, track prices and to place some orders through unscripted “conversations” with customers.

Those features are on top of shopping updates from AI platforms like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Gemini. In one of the season’s most talked-about launches, Google this month introduced an AI agent that can be instructed to call local stores to ask if a desired product is in stock.

San Francisco software company Salesforce estimated that AI would influence $73 billion, or 22%, of all global sales in one way or another from the Tuesday before Thanksgiving through Monday after the holiday, according to Caila Schwartz, Salesforce’s director of consumer insights.

The figure, which stood at $60 billion a year ago, encompasses everything from a ChatGPT query to AI-supplied gift suggestions on a retailer’s website, Schwartz said.

Despite the advancements, AI’s impact on holiday shopping will be “relatively limited” this year since not every shopping site has useful tools and not every shopper is willing to try them, said Brad Jashinsky, a senior retail industry analyst at information technology research and consulting firm Gartner.

“The more retailers that launch these tools, the better they get, and the more that consumers get comfortable and start to seek them out,” Jashinsky said. “But customer behavior takes a long time to change.”

Here are three ways the technology is poised to influence holiday shopping habits in 2025:

Bypassing the search bar

AI’s potential to simplify the search for the perfect present is most apparent so far in tools that promise to give shoppers faster and more detailed results than a web browser with a lot fewer clicks.

OpenAI upgraded ChatGPT with a shopping research feature that provides personalized buyers’ guides. The information comes from product pages, reviews. prices and a user’s previous interactions with the chatbot. The tool works best for complicated products like electronics and appliances, or for “detail-heavy” items like beauty or sporting goods, OpenAI said.

Then there’s Rufus, the shopping assistant that Amazon rolled out last year. It now remembers information customers previously fed it, like having four children that all like board games, for example. A user’s browsing and purchase history and reviews are used to personalize recommendations.

Google upgraded its AI Mode search tool to provide answers to detailed questions composed in natural language. For example, users can tell the agent they want to buy a casual sweater to wear with skirt or jeans in New York in January that goes with a skirt or jeans,

Responses are pulled from Google’s 50 billion product listings. The tool can also produce charts with side-by-side comparisons of prices, features, reviews and other factors. Previously, shoppers had to use keywords, filters and product links to find the information they needed.

“This is an expansionary moment, I think, for all of technology and for commerce,” Lilian Rincon, vice president of product, consumer shopping at Google, recently told The Associated Press.

Meanwhile, Walmart’s AI shopping assistant, Sparky, offers occasion-based recommendations and synthesizes reviews. An AI-powered gift finder on Target’s app exclusively for the holidays responds to prompts such as the age and special hobbies of the recipient.

New pricing tools and alerts

Tools for tracking online prices have been around for years, including CamelCamelCamel, a third-party service for Amazon prices, as well as Paypal’s Honey browser extension for monitoring thousands of online shops.

This holiday season, shoppers have new options.

Amazon launched a 90-day pricing history tracker this month for virtually everything it sells. Shoppers also now can set up alerts to receive notifications when prices on specific items fall within their budgets.

Google, which for years had a basic price tracker, launched a more advanced version that lets users refine their requests with details like a garment’s size and color. Microsoft’s Copilot also launched a price tracker this year.

Jason Goldberg, chief commerce strategy officer at Publicis Groupe, said he thinks the new pricing tools will add more pressure on retailers to make sure their prices are competitive.

“A lot of consumers that weren’t even looking for price alerts are going to discover price alerts for the first time,” Goldberg predicted.

New ways to buy

Amazon, OpenAI and Google are racing to create tools that would allow for seamless AI-powered shopping by taking consumers from browsing to buying within the same program instead of having to go to a retailer’s website to complete a purchase.

OpenAI launched a new instant checkout feature that lets users buy products suggested by ChatGPT without leaving the app. Users can order merchandise from Etsy sellers and from some brands that use Shopify, including Glossier, Skims and Spanx.

OpenAI and Walmart announced a similar deal in October, saying the partnership would allow ChatGPT members to use the instant checkout feature to shop for nearly everything available on Walmart’s website except for fresh food. For now, however, the feature only supports buying one item at a time.

A different deal Target struck with OpenAI lets shoppers put multiple items in a cart on ChatGPT, including fresh food products. But when customers are ready to pay for their orders, they are directed away from the chatbot to the Target app.

New tools from Amazon and Google will give shoppers a taste of having autonomous AI assistants do the buying for them. While the services still are limited, “agentic AI” is intended to be more independent and advanced than the generative AI chatbots that excel at research and writing, experts say.

Amazon is now letting Rufus automatically purchase items for customers who click an “auto buy” button while setting up price alerts. Once a product’s price drops to the desired level, customers receive notice of their completed orders and have a limited window to cancel, the company said.

The e-commerce giant also started allowing shoppers to use Rufus searches for brand-name products on the Amazon app as a gateway to other retailers. If Amazon doesn’t carry a desired item in its store, a “Shop Direct” button will take them to the website of a place that does.

Google’s AI Mode price tracker also includes a “buy for me” option that automatically makes a customer’s purchase through Google Pay when the price is right. The feature is available for products sold by Wayfair, Chewy, Quince and some Shopify merchants, and Google expects to keep adding more stores, the company said. sellers.

Google also expanded its web browser with an automated AI call feature that phones local businesses on behalf of customers looking for information or specific products. Google’s program discloses to the store that it’s an AI caller, and stores can choose not to participate, the company said.

Google said it’s applying the feature initially to specific product categories: toys, health and beauty, and electronics. Target and Walmart declined to comment on whether this type of service would be part of their future plans.