Five 2026 holiday predictions from Salesforce
Social commerce will be the fastest-growing transaction channel this holiday season.
That’s one of five core predictions from Salesforce about the forces that will drive the most impactful moments for retail in the 2026 holiday shopping season.
According to Salesforce, the brands that win this year’s holiday season won’t be the ones who stayed the course. Instead, they’ll be the ones that “understood exactly how digital innovation, physical retail, and economic polarization are rewriting the rules, and then adapted — fast,” the company said.
Below is a review of Salesforce’s five holiday predictions.
1. AI agents will have an outsized impact on e-commerce traffic. Salesforce predicts that 20% of all 2026 holiday e-commerce traffic will originate from AI chat agents and will be a mix of consumer-facing bots handling live queries, autonomous agents executing backend tasks and competitor scrapers fueling algorithmic price-matching.
2. Brands and retailers will rush to launch their own agents. Salesforce research shows that general AI assistants earn their place early in the journey: gift list generation, promo code hunting, product comparisons. But when shoppers need reliable information when it matters most, whether it’s about order management, returns, loyalty management, or customer service they prefer brand-owned agents.
The company predicts that one in three e-commerce sites will have a personal, site-specific shopper agent live by Cyber Week 2026.
3. Social commerce moves the point of purchase further away from retailers’ websites. Social media purchases surged 17% year-over-year. Looking ahead to the holiday season, 28% of Gen Z plan to shop through social apps (up from 25% in May 2025), followed by 22% of millennials, 12% of Gen X and 3% of boomers.
Salesforce predicts that social commerce will be the fastest-growing transaction channel this holiday season, growing at nine times the rate of traditional e-commerce.
4. The store closes the loop. When it comes to holiday shopping channel preferences, physical stores lead by a wide margin at 77%, outpacing online marketplaces (69%), brand websites (36%) and retailer websites (30%).
Salesforce noted that the store doesn’t exist in isolation anymore. Instead, it is the final "node" in a deeply digital journey. While 42% of consumers visit specifically to buy something they already researched online, 79% are actively on their phones while walking the aisles, checking competitor prices (24%), browsing social for style inspiration (15%), hunting discount codes (14%) and checking loyalty apps (9%). And 12% of in-store shoppers are already turning to an AI assistant right at the shelf for a style check or purchasing advice.
According to Salesforce, 38% of all holiday retail dollars will be “hybrid sales,” or purchases purchases that rely on an intertwining of digital research, AI tools, or mobile activity alongside a physical storefront to close the loop.
5. The K-shaped economy creates two different holiday realities. The “average consumer” doesn’t exist this holiday season, according to Salesforce, with sharp divides among different income groups with regards to spending intent and use of technology. But the K-shape flattens entirely when it comes to free shipping. Across every income level, shoppers ranked free shipping as the single most important factor in deciding who to shop from this holiday season.
Salesforce forecasts that retailers will spend an additional $3 billion globally to subsidize free shipping this holiday season as geopolitical factors increase logistics costs. This represents a year-over-year cost increase of 7% compared to costs over the 2025 holiday season.
“Combined with high return volumes, fulfillment has become a high-stakes variable that could make or break holiday profitability,” the company said.
