seasonal

Adobe Analytics recorded $257.8 billion in US online spending across the full 2025 holiday season. UK shoppers spent a record £26.9 billion. AI-referred traffic converted 54% better on Thanksgiving. Those are the headline numbers. The less-headline numbers are, as usual, the more interesting ones.

Salesforce says AI influenced $67 billion in Cyber Week sales. Adobe tracked a 693% surge in AI traffic to retail sites. The numbers are real. What they mean takes a little more work.

Easter 2025 was the first major UK retail season where AI-powered demand forecasting, personalised promotional timing, and AI-assisted customer service all operated at meaningful scale simultaneously. The results weren't transformative — but they were instructive.

UK online spend on Black Friday 2024 hit £1.12 billion — a 7.2% year-on-year increase and the strongest Black Friday since 2021. The AI traffic story was early but present. The mobile payment story was significant. And BNPL hit £117 million in a single day.

Easter is one of the bigger seasonal retail events in the UK calendar, and one of the most technically demanding for ecommerce teams — compressed timeframes, perishable stock, and demand patterns that are both predictable and notoriously hard to get exactly right. It's a good stress test for AI planning tools.