How AI, mobile devices and deals helped Cyber Week 2025 break records
The 2025 edition of Cyber Week was the most successful yet.
Another Cyber Week has come and gone, and retailers have a lot to be happy about. Although continuing inflation contributed to sales growth, the fact remains online spending throughout the five-day period between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday exceeded expectations with healthy year-over-year increases every day.
[READ MORE: Cyber Monday, Cyber Week online sales up roughly 7%]
Broadly speaking, Cyber Week’s performance indicates that despite stubbornly high prices and general uncertainty over the economy, consumers are still willing to spend money on the holidays. But if you dig into the data, you will find some more specific trends that helped retailers feel the seasonal spirit as online shoppers checked items off their gift lists.
Mobile becomes dominant
Mobile devices have been steadily increasing their share of overall online spend in the past few years, nibbling away at the supremacy of desktop PCs as the preferred e-commerce interface for consumers. During this year’s Cyber Week, those nibbles turned into a ravenous bite.
According to Adobe Analytics data, roughly 53% of season-to-date online sales and close to six-in-10 (57.5%) online Cyber Monday sales came through a mobile device (compared to desktop). On Cyber Monday, this represented $8.2 billion in spend (up 8% year over year).
Only 33% of Cyber Monday online sales came through a mobile device as recently as 2019. And mobile devices played a key role in boosting usage of the flexible buy now, pay later (BNPL) payment method, which hit an all-time high of $1.03 billion in online Cyber Monday spend (up 4.2% year over year). Eight-in-10 (79.4%) of BNPL transactions happened on a mobile device on Cyber Monday.
So it’s no surprise that Adobe advises mobile has become the dominant online shopping form factor during the holiday season. In other jolly seasonal news, Adobe says mobile devices tend to drive more impulse shopping and prop up online growth as a result.
Shopping agents of fortune
Cyber Week 2025 may come to be known as the event which solidified the importance of agentic AI to digital commerce. Salesforce analysis revealed that across the entire five-day period, AI and agents influenced 20% of all orders, accounting for $67 billion in global sales.
In the U.S., AI and agents drove 17% of Cyber Week orders, or $13.5 billion in sales. AI and agents also influenced $9.3 billion in global online sales and $2 billion in the U.S. on Cyber Monday.
It’s also worth noting that the share of global and U.S. traffic from third-party AI agent channels on Cyber Monday (such as ChatGPT and Perplexity) tripled compared to the same time period last year. Agentic customer service conversations on Cyber Monday grew 67% compared to the previous week globally.
Retailers need to ensure their digital commerce channels are compatible with shopping agents and offer agentic customer service chatbots. They should also follow the example of retailers like Walmart and offer full shopping experiences, including checkout, within leading third-party agentic models like ChatGPT.
If you discount it, they will come
Finally, Cyber Week reinforced the findings from Amazon Prime Big Deal Days (and competing fall omnichannel sales extravaganzas) that inflation and the proliferation of retail promotional events isn’t dampening consumer enthusiasm to get a good deal.
In addition, the increasingly early start of the holiday promotional season so far is not having an impact on digital sales performance. Cyber Week revenues actually came in slightly ahead of most predictions and Adobe and Salesforce are maintaining their previous holiday season forecasts.
Retailers should also consider that data shows in many cases, customers took advantage of deep Cyber Week discounts to purchase higher-cost items, rather than just getting the lowest prices possible. Consumers love saving money, and also don’t mind if a good deal makes a pricier purchase easier to justify. Happy (and profitable) Holidays!
