The 2025 holiday shopping season kicked off with strong momentum across the retail landscape, pushing Black Friday/Cyber Monday performance to new spending highs while highlighting clear shifts in how and where consumers are choosing to spend amid rising prices and uncertainty around tariffs.

Flexport, once again, saw a banner year for its Fulfillment business with record breaking numbers for orders and total units processed through its network during Cyber 5 (Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday). This resulted in the largest shipping days in Flexport's history.

Black Friday & Cyber Monday Wins: Flexport Performance Recap

Flexport's fulfillment network experienced record Cyber 5 volumes, processing 71% more orders and 92% more units for our merchants. These figures highlight both increased consumer demand and Flexport's efficient operational scaling during the intense holiday shipping period.

Black Friday was the single largest day in Flexport Fulfillment history, with order volume up 92% year over year and units processed up 117%. Growth was propelled by record performance across Shopify and TikTok Shop, which saw their order volumes within Flexport’s network increase by 103% and 92%, respectively.

Cyber Monday built on the momentum, becoming the biggest online shopping day of the year with an estimated $14.2 billion in total ecommerce sales. This resulted in substantial growth for Flexport merchants, who saw a 68% increase in orders and a 90% increase in units ingested on Cyber Monday.

Across the five-day shopping event, over 1 million shoppers received a Flexport-fulfilled order, demonstrating the warehouse network’s capacity to serve high-volume, high-demand order periods at scale. The warehouse and operations teams are working continuously to ensure world-class execution during Peak, moving quickly to process and ship orders within 1 day of receipt and delivering in just 3.5 days on average.

One of Flexport’s top shipping customers this year was Pact, whose President & CFO Drew Cook said, “This year we have been lucky to experience steady growth in our business and Flexport has continued to be a big part of that journey with us working hand in hand when we have regularly exceeded DTC forecasts and expanded multi-channel B2B extensively. We are coming off of a BFCM that saw twice as much volume than last year and we’re relieved to be with a partner who recovers fast from our business spikes and acts like a true extension of our business.”

Along with Pact, Flexport’s leading merchants by order volume over the Cyber 5 shopping period were Comfrt and Everlane.

Cyber 5 Shopping Trends

Holiday Shoppers Spent More, But Got Less

Consumer spending over the five-day period from Thanksgiving to December 1 reached an estimated $78 billion in the U.S., representing a 3% year-over-year increase despite concerns over rising prices and the shifting tariff landscape.

This spending growth was uneven, however, as Salesforce shared that price increases tampered demand, with shoppers spending more for fewer items at checkout. Black Friday 2025 saw a drop in both the quantity of items purchased and the overall volume of orders compared to the previous year. Specifically, the number of units per transaction decreased by 2%, and total order volume fell by 1% compared to Black Friday 2024.

This is largely attributed to broad price increases, with consumers seeing 7% higher average selling prices (ASP) compared to 2024. Early results from Reuters suggest that much of the spending growth was driven by wealthy shoppers paying for premium products while lower-income shoppers were more discerning and willing to compare product offers to find the best deal.

This disparity may also be reflected in the growth of “Buy Now, Pay Later” (BNPL) services like AfterPay and Klarna. Adobe Analytics estimates that these services saw spending rise to over $10.1 billion, a 9% increase from the 2024 holiday shopping season.

Online and Mobile Sales Growth Soared

While brick and mortar stores were still expected to drive the majority of BFCM shopping, online purchases reached new heights this year. Ecommerce purchases surpassed $44.2 billion, producing record engagement and buying during the holiday shopping week.

Mobile leads the way in online shopping, with 70% of sales and 80% of traffic expected to come from mobile devices during Cyber Week, and 25% of purchases anticipated via mobile wallets like Apple Pay once full data is available. 2025 will mark the first full year in which mobile accounts for over 50% of online spend during Cyber 5.

This set the stage for AI-driven shopping tools to play an increasingly central role in peak season consumer behavior.

Shoppers Turned to AI Agents to Find the Best Deals

The proliferation of AI tools and agents had a particularly strong impact on Cyber 5 shopping this year. Even before the major shopping days began, reports indicated that nearly two-thirds of consumers expressed interest in using AI tools to shop for the best deals and compare sites.

Those predictions proved correct, as AI-driven traffic to U.S. retail sites soared 805% compared to last year. Consumers increasingly relied on AI tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, Amazon Rufus, and Walmart Sparky to find and compare deals. Those tools helped drive a record $11.8 billion in online sales on Black Friday 2025, marking a 9.1% year-over-year increase.

How Did Major Ecommerce Players Perform?

• Amazon: The BFCM promotion was once again extended to a 12-day period (Nov 20 - Dec 1), after the retail giant saw record sales last year. While Amazon has not released its Cyber 5 metrics, they do anticipate that Q4 2025 sales will grow between 10% - 13% year-over-year.
• Shopify: In a LinkedIn post, Shopify President, Harley Finkelstein, shared that merchants achieved a record $14.6 billion in Black Friday - Cyber Monday sales over the weekend of December 2, 2025, a 27% increase versus 2024. More than 81 million customers bought from Shopify-powered brands, and nearly 95,000 merchants had their highest-selling day ever on Shopify.
• TikTok Shop: TikTok Shop generated an estimated $500 million in sales during the 2025 BFCM period, cementing the social media site as a major ecommerce player. While historically TikTok has relied on sales from small and mid-sized businesses, the platform now features holiday shopping listings from major brands across categories.
• SHEIN Marketplace: While SHEIN Marketplace has yet to release their Cyber 5 performance data, the platform could see strong performance due to their expansion beyond the fashion category into lifestyle, beauty, and home goods.

For a deeper dive, watch our Black Friday and Cyber Monday webinar as Flexport’s experts unpack the biggest trends from the season’s busiest shopping days.