(NEW YORK) — Online shoppers set a record high on Thanksgiving, paving the way for gangbusters performance on Black Friday, Adobe data showed.
Digital spending on Thanksgiving jumped 5% from a year earlier, totaling $6.4 billion and exceeding Adobe’s expectations, the firm said.
The company also expects Black Friday shoppers to set a new record, outpacing last year’s total by more than 8%.
Adobe attributed the strong performance on Thanksgiving to better-than-anticipated discounts, especially for electronics. Discounts also touched an array of products from furniture to appliances to toys.
“Given the strength of Thanksgiving deals, Adobe is adjusting its discount forecast for the big shopping days coming up,” Adobe said in a statement to ABC News. “Deals are now expected to be on par with the elevated levels seen in the last holiday shopping season.”
A surge in the popularity of AI retail assistants also contributed to the nationwide shopping spree, Adobe said. AI-driven traffic to online sellers soared 725% compared to last year, the firm said, stemming primarily from chatbots designed to aid consumers.
Shoppers who arrived at a retail website from an AI service were 54% more likely to make a purchase than those who did not, Adobe said.
“The magnitude of discounts was the big story on Thanksgiving yesterday, as retailers leaned into delivering great deals to drive consumer demand online,” Vivek Pandya, lead analyst at Adobe Digital Insights, told ABC News in a statement.
“This was further propped up by impulse-led mobile shopping and the use of generative AI which assisted shoppers in locating the best deals, two trends that helped deliver higher-than-expected overall spend on Thanksgiving,” Pandya added.
The early returns for the holiday shopping season arrive at a wobbly moment for the U.S. economy.
Inflation has picked up in recent months, putting price increases a full percentage point above the Fed’s target of 2%. Meanwhile, hiring has slowed, posing a risk of an economic double-whammy known as “stagflation.”
Alongside those headwinds, consumer spending among middle- and low-income Americans has slowed, triggering warnings from restaurant giants such as McDonald’s and Chipotle. A report this month showed consumer sentiment has fallen to its lowest point since a peak of pandemic-era inflation in 2022, University of Michigan data showed.
Retailers hope shoppers defy these trends over the holiday season, when spending typically surges. The outcome could hold significant stakes for the wider economy, since consumer spending accounts for about two-thirds of U.S. economic activity.
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