The 2024 holiday season has come and gone.
But how did this year stack up for brands? Where, how, and why did consumers spend? What changed, and what stayed the same? And most importantly, what does this mean for brands in 2025?
This 2024 holiday post-mortem will explore major trends that defined this spending season and offer ecommerce insights to help boost your brand this year.
The big takeaways from this holiday season? Mobile buying is up, but retail purchases remain businesses’ bread and butter.
As noted by Adobe, consumers spent $241.4 billion online from Nov. 1 to Dec. 31, which is up 8.7% year-over-year and set a new ecommerce record. Of the $241 billion spent, more than half (54%) happened via smartphones. But this isn’t the whole story. Visa reports that 77% of holiday purchases happened in-store, while just 23% happened online.
Black Friday saw $10.8 billion in online sales, while Forbes notes that in-store traffic dropped 8.2%. Between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. across the United States, consumers collectively spent $11.3 million per minute.
According to Adobe, Cyber Monday surpassed expectations this year with U.S. consumers spending $13.3 billion online. In addition, traffic to retail sites from links created by generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) chatbots was up 1,950%. an increase of 7.3% from 2023. This makes Cyber Monday the biggest online shopping day of all time.
Overall, consumer spending was up 4.8% this holiday season, according to Visa. That’s good news for both online and in-store retailers. Worth noting, however, is that this number doesn’t exist in isolation. While spending is up, consumer purchasing patterns have changed.
Four behaviors impacting holiday spend include seeking out sales, spending on social media, starting the online search, and shopping more frequently.
According to upcoming Salsify consumer research, 66% of shoppers say they’ve cut back on non-essential purchases, and 52% have shifted to less-expensive products. While holiday shopping falls slightly outside the “essential” category, buyers aren’t willing to cut loose just because it’s Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Instead, they’re looking for quality products from trusted brands at a great price.
If you want to capture customer interest on high-value spending days, make sure you come prepared with great deals and solid sales.
According to Sprout Social, 89% of consumers say that brand social media impacts their holiday spending. In addition, Salsify research reports that 39% of shoppers say they’ve purchased a product online because an influencer recommended it.
It’s worth noting that there’s variation across generations. For example, baby boomers are (unsurprisingly) the least likely to leverage influencer expertise, with just 28% saying they purchased a product after seeing it recommended. Gen X comes in at 34%, Gen Z at 43%, and millennials top the charts at 48%, according to Salsify consumer research.
Consumers are discovering more products online — even when they aren’t looking for them.
Known as “ambient shopping,” it’s the act of purchasing while doing something else, such as scrolling social media or watching a streaming video. Brands are more familiar with intentional shopping: Consumers decide they need or want a product and purposefully seek it out.
Ambient shopping has the potential to boost online sales if brands find ways to engage with customers when they aren’t looking to buy. It’s a lucrative opportunity; 69% of Salsify consumer research surveyees say they’ve participated in ambient shopping.
Brands also need to recognize that customers are shopping more frequently for what they need and want. While 22% of buyers say they shop online once per week, 23% say they do so several times each week, and 21% shop online daily, according to Salsify research.
The 2024 holiday season showcased two critical trends in consumer spending: Customers are more willing than ever to seek out and purchase products online, but they’re also more selective about what they purchase.
This creates both challenges and opportunities. If brands can connect with customers online, they have a better chance of driving conversions and creating repeat buyers. But it’s not enough to make products available on demand; brands need to back up quantity with quality.
Here are three strategies to help.
GenAI can interact with customers, create links to sales or contact pages, improve product descriptions, and follow up with buyers post-purchase.
For brands, this means it’s time to get comfortable with GenAI. It doesn’t need to be all-in, all at once, but it’s worth getting started even with a simple chatbot or content-building solution to better connect with customers.
As noted above, ambient shopping is now commonplace. In practice, this means companies need to consider how advertisements and offers interact with users’ day-to-day behaviors. This means building ad strategies that recognize the role of the environment in engagement.
For example, if your brand sells high-quality cleaning products, it’s worth focusing on social media scrolling environments such as cleaning enthusiasts on Instagram, which is a subset of social media focused on cleaning products and methods.
Customers want high-quality products but still want to keep spending under control. This highlights the need for value. For example, if you’re participating in Black Friday or Cyber Monday, sales need to be substantial.
During the remaining holiday period, consider offering a discount for larger purchases or purchase volumes, or additional benefits such as loyalty points or gifts with purchase.
Expect 2025 to be another high-flying year for ecommerce. Driven by social, ambient, and GenAI shopping, buyers are now exposed to more products, more often, creating the potential for a powerful new sales funnel — if brands can stick the landing.
The most important ecommerce insight for retailers to remember is that even when customers purchase in-store, they’ve likely been exposed to sales and marketing efforts online. It might be an influencer video, a social media post, or a chatbot-created link. It might be word-of-mouth from friends or family or previous online experience with a brand.
In other words, it all starts online. While in-store offers can help seal the deal, what’s bringing customers through the door is what they experience online. The result? Omnichannel efforts form the core of 2025 sales revenue. If brands can meet customers where, when, and how they prefer, they set themselves up for success.
This 2024 holiday post-mortem shows that Black Friday and Cyber Monday are very much alive, and helped kickstart a solid season of holiday spending. To make the most of 2025, brands need to build sales and marketing strategies that start online and help drive customers down the dual paths of digital and in-person purchasing.