According to Forbes, U.S. shoppers spent a record $11.8 billion online on Black Friday 2025, defying low consumer sentiment. Shopify merchants alone generated $14.6 billion over the Black Friday-Cyber Monday period, a 27% jump, with over 94,900 merchants having their best sales day ever. AI-driven traffic to retail sites exploded by 805% year-over-year as tools like ChatGPT became shopping destinations. Buy Now, Pay Later financing hit $747.5 million in U.S. online spend that day, up 8.9%. While e-commerce soared, physical mall traffic told a mixed story: Mall of America saw a record 235,000 visitors on Friday, but overall weekend foot traffic across small retailers fell by 5.3%.
AI is the new storefront
Here’s the thing: shoppers aren’t just Googling deals anymore. They’re asking AI. That 805% surge in AI-driven traffic isn’t a fluke; it’s a fundamental shift. Companies like OpenAI aren’t hiding their ambition—they’re building checkout flows right into ChatGPT. Why browse ten tabs when a chatbot can find the product, compare prices, and ring you up in one conversation? It’s all about that perceived speed and efficiency.
And retailers are racing to meet this behavior with their own AI agents. Amazon’s Rufus and Walmart’s Sparky aren’t cute experiments. Amazon says customers who use Rufus are over 60% more likely to buy during that session. That’s a staggering conversion lift. We’re watching the front-end of e-commerce get completely rebuilt. The “search bar” is becoming a “conversation,” and the first brand that convinces the AI might get the sale. It’s a huge challenge for retailers who’ve optimized for Google’s algorithms for decades.
The BNPL trap
So how are people affording all this? Often, with someone else’s money. Buy Now, Pay Later was a huge engine for that $11.8 billion record. Adobe predicted it would cross $1 billion for the whole Cyber Week. It feels like free money in the moment, right? But the data reveals the ugly trade-off.
A Stanford study literally called “Buy Now, Pain Later” found BNPL users saw nearly a 9% increase in overdraft charges and an 8.4% increase in late fees. It’s fueling sales by masking the true cost. This feels unsustainable at a macro level. As more people lean on installments for everyday shopping, the regulatory scrutiny is going to intensify. Can this growth continue if rules tighten? Probably not.
The physical store paradox
The narrative that “online killed the store” is too simple. Look at Mall of America—record-breaking crowds. But the broader data from RetailNext shows a 5.3% drop in overall foot traffic. What gives?
It’s not disinterest, it’s intention. As RetailNext’s analyst said, shoppers turned Black Friday into a “value calculation.” They went to the giant destinations with the best in-person promotions (like the mall) but skipped the smaller stores, likely checking prices online first. The frenzy is gone. People are stretched thin by inflation and are shopping with discipline. The store isn’t dead, but its role is changing: it’s becoming a showroom for deals you’ve already researched, or an experience for a big day out, not a place for blind impulse buys.
What it all means
Basically, Black Friday 2025 proved the holiday is evolving, not dying. The record online spend happened because of new tools (AI, BNPL) and a more calculated, frugal shopper—not in spite of them. E-commerce platforms like Shopify are enabling record sales for direct-to-consumer brands, while AI is reshaping the very beginning of the shopping journey.
For businesses, the playbook is changing. You need an AI strategy, not just a SEO strategy. You have to understand the real cost of pushing BNPL. And you must design physical retail for an audience that has already done its homework online. The impulsive, one-day frenzy is over. Welcome to the era of the calculated deal, powered by chatbots and paid for in installments.
