Black Friday

US online Black Friday spending rose 9.1% year over year to $11.8B in 2025, as coverage shifts from deal roundups toward platform, AI, and retail-performance data.

Who they are

Black Friday is the US holiday-shopping event that appears in technology coverage as both a consumer-deals moment and a benchmark for online retail demand. Stories connect it to Amazon, Adobe, Shopify and newer commerce channels, while recurring deal coverage spans devices, smart-home products, gaming, PCs and mobile hardware.

The recent arc

Coverage peaked historically in 2018Q4, when the dominant format was broad technology-deal curation and Amazon-related news, including disclosures of an email-and-name exposure during the shopping period. High-impact stories from 2015 through 2020 were similarly organized around lists of discounted TVs, laptops, phones, wearables, storage, audio and smart-home devices; labor action at Amazon facilities in Italy and Germany was a notable counterpoint in 2017. છેલ્લા

Recent coverage has returned to a steady holiday-quarter pattern, with four stories in each of 2024Q4 and 2025Q4, but its emphasis has moved to measured online-sales performance and commerce tooling. Adobe reported US Black Friday online sales of $10.8B in 2024 and $11.8B in 2025, while Salesforce tracked global online sales and attributed part of US activity to AI agents. TikTok reported more than $100M in US TikTok Shop sales on Black Friday in 2024, and OpenAI introduced ChatGPT shopping research ahead of the 2025 holiday period.

The tension

The coverage centers on whether Black Friday remains a discrete discount-driven retail event or is becoming one checkpoint in a broader, digitally mediated holiday-sales cycle. Amazon’s claim that Prime Day sales surpassed combined Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, Alibaba’s larger Singles’ Day model, and the emergence of TikTok Shop and AI-assisted shopping all challenge the event’s traditional role as the retail calendar’s singular demand peak.

Why it matters

If this trajectory continues, Black Friday will matter less only as a day for hardware markdowns and more as a recurring stress test for who controls product discovery, conversion and retail measurement across marketplaces, social commerce and AI interfaces. Adobe and Salesforce’s differing but complementary spending snapshots make the event a visible indicator of online demand, though the corpus does not establish which emerging shopping channel will retain customer attention beyond a given holiday season.

Related: Amazon · Adobe · Shopify · Best 2016 Black Friday deals on TVs, audio, smart home devices, camera · Best 2017 Black Friday deals on smart home devices, fitness trackers,