Adobe says consumers in the US spent $5.1B buying goods online on Thanksgiving, up 21.5% YoY, but falling short of Adobe's original prediction of $6B
Here's what you need to know: — The dominant retailers thrive. Tweets: Joe Martin / @joedmarti : My old team at @Adobe showing 22% growth in online sales yesterday with 47% coming from mobile. Covid-acceleration for eCom https://www.google.com/... Thanks: @ingridlunden
Context & Ripple Effects
Adobe's annual Thanksgiving readout has become the industry's benchmark for holiday e-commerce: it logged $2.87B in 2017 and a then-record $3.7B in 2018, before tracking Black Friday 2019 at $7.4B. The 2020 figure of $5.1B continues that series — and lands in the first pandemic holiday season, when most analysts expected digital demand to overshoot rather than undershoot forecasts.
First-order effects
- Retailers that sized inventory, staffing, and promotions against Adobe's original $6B projection face a roughly $900M demand shortfall on the single biggest day of the holiday run-up.
- The tweet from former Adobe analyst Joe Martin flags the split outcome: aggregate growth of 21.5% masks concentration, with dominant retailers capturing the bulk of the spend while smaller merchants see less of it.
Second-order effects
- A Thanksgiving miss pushes promotional intensity onto Black Friday and Cyber Monday, where Adobe's own later data shows deeper discounts are what lift Cyber Monday spending above both earlier days.
- With 47% of sales already closing on mobile — up from 36.7% of sales in 2018 — retailers that underinvested in mobile checkout now lose share during exactly the hours when the gap is widest.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, holiday e-commerce growth keeps decelerating off each year's larger base even amid pandemic tailwinds, forcing retailers to compete on discounts and mobile experience rather than counting on category-wide expansion.
- Adobe's index consolidates its role as the de facto scoreboard for US holiday retail, meaning one forecaster's miss can itself move retailer expectations and market narratives each November.
The trend: US holiday e-commerce is growing fast but decelerating against its own enlarging base, with mobile becoming the majority channel and discount timing shifting spend toward Cyber Monday.