Salesforce says online Black Friday sales hit $74.4B globally, up 5% YoY, and $17.5B in the US, up 7% YoY; Adobe says US online sales hit $10.8B, up 10.2% YoY
The momentum of Thanksgiving — which saw consumers spend a record $33.6 billion spent globally online on the day — looks like it continued into Black Friday, with a bang.
Context & Ripple Effects
The result extends a strong start to the holiday weekend: Salesforce had already measured $33.6B in global online Thanksgiving sales, with U.S. sales up year over year. It also follows a 2023 Black Friday in which both Salesforce and Adobe reported lower U.S. totals under their respective measurement approaches.
The two firms’ figures are not directly interchangeable, but their parallel year-over-year gains give retailers and commerce-platform customers an early read on online demand during the peak promotional window.
First-order effects
- Retailers and brands selling online enter the rest of the holiday weekend with evidence that Black Friday demand increased, supporting continued investment in fulfillment, promotions and site capacity.
- Salesforce and Adobe gain fresh proof points for the commerce and analytics data their customers use to track major shopping events, while their differing totals reinforce that each is measuring a distinct data set.
Second-order effects
- Merchants may calibrate Cyber Monday discounts and inventory allocation against stronger-than-last-year Black Friday demand rather than treating Thanksgiving as an isolated spike.
- Competing commerce, payments and analytics vendors face added pressure to provide similarly timely transaction intelligence, since retailers need operational signals during a compressed holiday period.
Third-order effects
- If recurring growth across Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday persists, holiday demand measurement becomes a more strategic product layer for enterprise software vendors—not just post-event reporting.
- The continuing gap between platform-reported totals suggests the market will rely more on directional comparisons than a single definitive online-sales benchmark, unless measurement methodologies become more comparable.
The trend: Holiday retail is increasingly managed as a real-time, data-driven online sales cycle, with commerce platforms competing to define the demand signals retailers act on.