The True Story of BFCM 2025

Rounding up this year's BFCM statistics, and what you can take away from them.

Author

Pietro Saccomani
December 11, 2025

All the data from BFCM 2025 is in.

You’ll have seen the headlines: “Record-breaking sales weekend” works well for media outlets. But it doesn’t always tell the whole story; or the story you actually need to know.

This week we’re putting all the data together, and stripping it back to see what you can trust, as well as what’s actually useful.

There are some fascinating takeaways, if you know what to look for.

Let’s dive in now.

Overall spend is up (but by how much?)

As you might have seen in the headlines, overall spend for BFCM is up.

Here are the numbers from a few outlets:

  • Shopify merchants did $14.6 billion in global sales over BFCM, a 27% increase from 2024.

  • Adobe reports total spend from Nov 1 - Dec 1 at $137.4B, up 7.1% YoY.

  • Spend (per Adobe) was $11.8B on Black Friday (up ~9%) and $14.25B on Cyber Monday (up ~7.1%)

  • Adobe projects holiday season spend at $253.4B (up 5% YoY)

  • Mastercard has ecommerce sales up 10.4% vs 2024 (compared to just 1.4% growth for in-store).

  • Knocommerce’s figures show 21.2% increase in sales from Nov 25 - Dec 3.

  • Salesforce shows a 7% growth in global online sales over Cyber Week - hitting $336.6B.

None of these figures encapsulate the entire online shopping landscape. In general it seems to show that people are spending more online - good for brands, you would imagine.

But some of what’s being reported could be misleading.

The Shopify figure, for example. The 27% increase in sales vs 2024 includes new merchants on Shopify. And as we all know, Shopify has been eating up smaller platforms and growing at a major rate.

So keep in mind that this figure doesn’t mean ecommerce sales increased by 27% YoY. Shopify sales did.

Adobe & Salesforce both put it around 7% growth YoY. Which, once you factor in inflation, looks a lot slower..

Yet if we look at data from Knocommerce, we’re looking at 21.2% revenue growth vs 2024.

This is only from 1,800 ecommerce brands, so a much smaller snapshot than what Adobe or Salesforce has to work with.

But it does suggest that, perhaps, growth is stronger for independent brands vs the kind of enterprise brands tracked by Adobe/SF.

Also, Mastercard’s data shows much stronger growth for ecommerce (10.4%) vs in-store (1.4%), indicating good news for brands whose primary channel is online.

Takeaway: Online spending grew, but that growth varies by dataset. Don’t take one figure as gospel.

Efficiency is down (aka, it’s tough out there)

While sales are up, that doesn’t tell the whole story.

According to SourceMedium, ad spend and CAC for DTC brands were up significantly for the month of November (vs 2024). While conversion rates were down.

These figures tell an interesting story:

  • Ad spend 124% of 2024.

  • Clicks and attributed sales both higher.

Also, CPMs are up, CTR is up significantly.

So ads are getting attention, driving traffic, and driving sales.

But every click, every sale, costs more.

That means less profit to go around (even worse when you consider the cost of tariffs, which are still having an impact).

Takeaway: Sales are rising, but ad costs are rising faster, meaning every click and conversion is eating more of a brand’s profit.

Are there leaks in your funnel?

There’s a similarly interesting story from SourceMedium’s data on email & SMS.

Shoppers got roughly the same amount of emails as last year - and over 2x as many SMSes.

The more interesting part is performance.

Email drove nearly 50% more clicks than last year (on a similar number of sends), while there were almost 5x more clicks from SMS.

Yet attributed sales to these platforms was only 80% of what it was in 2024.

  • Increase in clicks

  • Big increase in click rate

  • Decrease in sales

This could indicate higher competition for attention. Shorter attention spans. Consumers being tighter with their wallets.

Or marketing is getting stronger, but sites are getting leakier.

I noticed something while monitoring nearly 100 shopping apps over BFCM.

Only 30% had an abandoned cart push sequence.

That’s a big missed opportunity for the other 70%. And I wonder how many other opportunities there are on your website to plug leaks and convert more of your email/SMS clicks.

At the very least, keep this in mind for next year. Holding on to more of your clicks, or recovering them after they bounce, could be your biggest revenue lift.

Takeaway: Email and SMS are driving far more clicks but fewer sales, a sign that many brands don’t have acquisition problems; they have conversion leaks.

The pre-BFCM boom

There’s another thing I noticed from looking at brands over Cyber Week; or more specifically the week before.

75% of brands were basically in full BFCM swing on the Monday prior to Black Friday.

It’s not a 5-day sprint anymore. Clearly, many brands are taking advantage of the excitement for a longer promotional period, while at the same time getting in front of their customers at times when there’s less noise.

Salesforce’s data tells a similar story, with many verticals seeing much stronger revenue growth earlier in the week, compared to the traditional Black Friday/Cyber Monday.

Apparel:

Beauty (makeup):

Beauty (skincare):

Food & Beverage:

Electronics:

Luxury bucked the trend, with stronger growth on Friday:

Overall, growth was relatively even, but certainly stronger on Tuesday, Wednesday, Sunday (compared to BF/CM):

That was something I predicted coming into BFCM, and it looks like it held up.

It could also explain something about the decrease in conversion rate from email & SMS.

Longer promo windows = less urgency. Shoppers are smart. They know your sale probably isn’t “today only” - I wonder how many decided to check back a day or two later looking for a better deal.

Takeaway: Shoppers started buying earlier than ever, stretching the promo window and possibly diluting urgency across the traditional Black Friday/Cyber Monday spike.

The thing about statistics

One thing to keep in mind:

You can spin the same dataset 12 different ways.

Context is always important. For instance, you might have seen a report from Adobe that AI traffic to online stores increased 758% over November.

Looks impressive? Sure, it looks like AI is blowing up, and you should drop everything to start astroturfing on Reddit.

But compared to what? Last year, when AI search wasn’t really a thing.

Keep that in mind when you see data thrown around. Same with Shopify’s data, or anyone’s, honestly.

There’s the limit of sample size, plus who is in that sample.

Shopify’s data comes from Shopify merchants, so it’s slanted a certain way. Same thing for Adobe/SF.

So what’s really important?

The data you have.

Is your store growing vs last year? Are you making a profit? Are your marketing channels getting more effective? Is your MER improving?

These are the most important pieces to track.

Wider stats can be good for context. But don’t lean on them too hard as a benchmark.

Just focus on growing your performance.

Takeaway: Industry stats can tell any story you want, but the only numbers that actually matter are your own performance, profitability, and channel efficiency.

Take control of your sales

If you don’t want to rely on a thousand algorithms to stay in front of your buyers, you need a mobile app.

It’s a direct connection to your best customer. And finally lets you own the relationship (no middlemen controlling your reach — no more being forgotten).

MobiLoud turns your existing site into an app, with no rebuilding, nearly no work to maintain, and full feature parity with your website.

Quick Hits

Shopify Agentic Storefronts

The new AI products just keep coming. Shopify just announced Agentic Storefronts - letting brands enable one-click purchases in multiple AI shopping platforms, plus full control over how your products appear, right from the Shopify admin.

Yotpo DTC Index

Yotpo just launched something cool too. The DTC Index is a dashboard of ecom’s top DTC brands, showing revenue, growth and more.

Shopping App Downloads Increased 10% Over BFCM

Online shopping is getting increasingly mobile. And an increasing share of shoppers are going to apps.

Appfigures’ data showed a 10% increase in shopping app downloads in the US in November, vs November of the previous year. In total there were 69M new downloads in the shopping app category.

Time you had your own?

Whatnot - the Next Big Channel?

One of the standout risers in terms of app downloads was Whatnot - with 541% more downloads this November vs last.

Whatnot is a live selling/buy and sell marketplace; think Twitch meets ebay.

Right now, it’s not really brands selling on the platform. But that could change.

At the very least, it’s a signal of what could be a huge new trend in the US in 2026 - live selling (which is enormous in markets like East/Southeast Asia).

Something to watch. We broke down everything you need to know about Whatnot in the link below.

Kim Kardashian’s Variety Show

On the topic of live selling, Kim Kardashian recently hosted “Kimsmas” on TikTok - basically a variety show, featuring such guests as Snoop Dogg, and (of course) selling her SKIMS brand.

I don’t think this is the last we’ll see of this kind of thing. Watch as the lines between social, entertainment and ecommerce blur increasingly more.

That’s all for now.

I’ll be back in touch next week, with more on how successful brands are doing CX and retention right.

If there’s any topic you’d like to see us dive into, for either the newsletter or the podcast, just shoot me a message here.

Until next time,

Pietro and The Retention Edge Team

PS: want to boost retention, revenue and profitability? If so, launching your own app could be the best move you make this year.

See how: go to our website to get a preview of your app for free, or shoot me a DM on LinkedIn to talk about it.