The National Retail Federation expects holiday sales to top $1 trillion for the first time this year, and with Adobe forecasting a record $275.1 billion online and AI-driven shopping traffic more than doubling, the weeks before Black Friday on Nov. 27 will decide how much of that spending reaches small businesses’ own websites.

The headline forecasts

On Oct. 15, 2026, the NRF projected that November and December retail sales will grow 4.2 percent from last year, to $1.013 trillion. Its figures exclude auto dealers, gas stations and restaurants. Last season came in at $972 billion, a 3.1 percent gain, short of the trade group’s own initial forecast, according to Chain Store Age. NRF President and CEO Matthew Shay said households “continue to navigate persistent inflation and uneven confidence about the economy,” Logistics Management reported. The group expects retailers to hire 325,000 to 375,000 seasonal workers, roughly in line with about 356,000 last year.

Other forecasters land in a similar range for total spending. Deloitte projects holiday retail sales from November through January will rise 4 percent to 4.8 percent, to about $1.7 trillion. The Mastercard Economic Institute expects retail sales excluding autos and gas to rise 5.5 percent between Nov. 1 and Dec. 24, which coverage of its forecast described as the strongest growth in four years.

Online grows faster than the season

Every major forecast has e-commerce outpacing total retail. Adobe, which tracks transactions on retail websites, projects U.S. online holiday spending of $275.1 billion from Nov. 1 through Dec. 31, up 6.7 percent. Deloitte’s range for holiday e-commerce is $316.1 billion to $318.9 billion, up 7.5 percent to 8.4 percent, using a longer season and a different method. Mastercard’s institute put online growth at 11 percent and in-store growth at 3.9 percent.

Adobe’s day-by-day projections show where the pressure lands. It expects Cyber Week, from Thanksgiving on Nov. 26 through Cyber Monday on Nov. 30, to bring in $47.5 billion, up 7.4 percent. Cyber Monday alone is forecast at $15.1 billion, which Adobe said “is expected to set a new milestone for U.S. e-commerce.” Black Friday is forecast at $12.9 billion and Thanksgiving at $6.9 billion, both growing faster than Cyber Monday. Adobe expects peak discounts of up to 30 percent during Cyber Week, with electronics and toys leading.

Inflation is doing part of the work

The trillion-dollar figure is not all new demand. NRF economists said nearly half of the 4.2 percent gain reflects higher prices, according to Chain Store Age, and the trade group expects core goods inflation to average 2.5 percent in 2026, up from 1.6 percent in 2025. NRF chief economist Mark Mathews pointed to higher diesel prices raising shipping costs and surging memory-chip prices weighing on electronics, Logistics Management reported. NRF also cited rising gas prices, higher interest rates and elevated consumer debt as reasons retailers are hiring cautiously.

For a small retailer, that combination means customers comparing prices more carefully while the retailer’s own costs for shipping and inventory climb.

AI and phones change where the click comes from

The fastest-growing source of shopping traffic is not a search engine or a social feed. Adobe expects referrals from generative AI tools to U.S. retail sites to rise 130 percent from last year, with jumps of 159 percent on Thanksgiving, 95 percent on Black Friday and 88 percent on Cyber Monday. Salesforce, in its July holiday predictions, forecast that AI chat agents would generate 20 percent of all holiday e-commerce traffic worldwide and that one in three e-commerce sites would have a shopping agent of their own live by Cyber Week.

Phones remain the default storefront. Adobe expects mobile devices to account for 57.4 percent of online holiday spending, up from 56.4 percent, and 82 percent of buy-now-pay-later spending, which it forecasts at $21.3 billion for November and December, up 6.6 percent.

Where marketing dollars are moving

Hard forecasts for holiday ad prices are scarce; none of the major retail forecasters published projections for search or social ad costs. The channel data that does exist points away from paid search. Adobe projects that social media’s share of online revenue will grow 17 percent and affiliates and partners, including influencers, 12 percent, compared with 4 percent for paid search. Salesforce predicted social commerce would grow nine times faster than traditional e-commerce and that retailers would spend an extra $3 billion globally on free shipping.

“Getting eyes on your brand is no longer the same as closing the sale,” Salesforce consumer insights director Caila Schwartz wrote in the company’s predictions.

Fenway’s Take

The forecasts describe a season that is bigger on paper, partly inflated by prices, and increasingly routed through intermediaries: AI assistants, marketplaces and social platforms. For a local shop, bakery or service business, the risk is not that holiday shoppers stay home. It is that the shoppers who would have found the business directly now arrive through a channel that summarizes, compares and sometimes completes the purchase elsewhere.

The counterweight is a website that answers the questions an AI assistant or a hurried phone shopper asks, in plain text, on fast pages: what is in stock, what it costs, when it ships or when the store is open, and how to pay. Adobe’s growth in buy-now-pay-later spending and mobile share suggests that payment options and mobile checkout speed are not cosmetic. They are where holiday orders are won or abandoned.

Timing matters as much as content. Changes made the week of Thanksgiving have little time to be crawled, tested or fixed. The practical window for a small business to prepare its site is the next three weeks.

What it means for you

• Publish holiday hours, shipping cutoff dates and return policies as plain text on your site and in your Google Business Profile by mid-November, so AI tools and search can find them.
• Test checkout on a phone over a cellular connection, including any buy-now-pay-later option, and remove steps that require creating an account.
• Build one page per gift category or offer rather than a single long sale page, so each can be found and cited on its own.
• Plan for higher shipping costs in pricing and free-shipping thresholds rather than absorbing them during Cyber Week.
• Freeze major site changes by about Nov. 20 so there is time to fix problems before Thanksgiving traffic arrives.

The post Holiday Sales Forecast Tops $1 Trillion as AI Shoppers Reshape the Season appeared first on Fenway Web.

BOSTON — Wall Street closed out a volatile week on a sour note Friday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average sliding more than 650 points as investors wrestled with two problems at once: fresh doubts about how much the biggest technology companies will keep spending on artificial intelligence, and crude oil pushing past $100 a barrel on rising tension in the Middle East.

The numbers at Friday’s close

• Dow Jones Industrial Average: 52,215.16, down 652.82 points (−1.23%)
• S&P 500: 7,623.68, down 39.75 (−0.52%)
• Nasdaq Composite: 25,955.34, down 53.52 (−0.21%)
• Russell 2000: 2,775.90, down 8.13 (−0.29%)
• 10-year Treasury yield: 4.99%, up about 3.5 basis points
• WTI crude (December): $103.44, up 3.99% — the highest since April; Brent topped $116
• Gold: $4,010, down 1.24%
• VIX: 19.45, up 2.21%

What moved the market

The AI spending question flipped. For most of 2026 the worry was that Big Tech was spending too much on data centers, chips and power. This week the worry inverted. Meta left its capital-expenditure guidance unchanged in its third-quarter report, and Tesla cut its full-year capex outlook by roughly 20%. “Tech stocks got slammed amid fresh concerns about the outlook for artificial intelligence,” Capital.com analyst Kyle Rodda said, noting the concern has shifted from spending being too high to spending possibly being too low. For the picks-and-shovels names that benefit from every new data center — power, cooling, networking — a slower build-out is a direct hit to the growth story, and it showed: Bloom Energy fell about 11% and Comfort Systems USA about 10.7% intraday.

Oil at $100-plus. WTI and Brent both reached their highest levels since April after reports that the United States and Israel are weighing further strikes on Iran following the November midterms, and after Iran warned it would target Gulf energy infrastructure if attacked. Higher oil feeds straight into inflation expectations, which is why the bond market sold off alongside stocks: the 10-year yield finished just under 5%.

The consumer is in a dark mood. The University of Michigan’s consumer-sentiment index fell to 48.0, near record lows, with one-year inflation expectations at 4.7%. That reading landed the same day American Express said it plans to trim about 5% of its workforce; its shares fell roughly 2.9%.

Hedge funds had a rough day. Reuters reported that several major hedge-fund strategies posted their worst single-day performance since the COVID-era rout of 2020, a sign of how crowded the AI-infrastructure trade had become.

Notable movers

• Crown Castle jumped about 11.7% and SBA Communications about 7.8% on reports that SpaceX is in talks to lease cell sites. SpaceX itself closed at $147.49 (+1.9%) after Phillip Securities upgraded the stock from Sell to Buy and lifted its price target to $250 from $75.
• Robert Half rose about 13% after earnings; RingCentral added about 6.6%.
• Deckers Outdoor slid about 6.2%; Kering, owner of Gucci and Saint Laurent, fell 12.4% after weak third-quarter results; Volvo Cars plunged about 24% on a plan to cut 2,500 jobs.
• Bitcoin hovered near $81,300, little changed on the day.

The Boston Made read

Three of the week’s threads run straight through the businesses in the Boston Made family.

AI infrastructure is now a two-sided bet. BOSSTOX has spent the fall tracking the companies that sell the compute, cooling, power and networking behind the AI build-out. This week is the first time the market priced in the possibility that the build-out slows. That doesn’t end the thesis — Meta’s guidance was unchanged, not cut — but it means the next leg is about which suppliers have contracted backlogs and which were riding sentiment. Expect BOSSTOX’s coverage to lean harder into backlog and order-book data from here.

$4,000 gold is a Main Street story, not just a trading story. Gold gave back about 1.2% Friday but remains above $4,000 an ounce. At these levels the “cash for gold” market — the local-dealer trade that Kingswell’s Lumo.gold is built to organize, with a live gold price and melt calculator for households deciding whether to sell jewelry or coins — matters to far more people than it did at $2,000 an ounce. A one-day pullback does not change that.

Small business feels the sentiment number first. A consumer-confidence reading of 48 is the kind of figure that shows up in restaurant bookings, home-improvement quotes and event calendars before it shows up in an index. Fenway Web’s clients — remodelers, realtors, churches, musicians — are the businesses that number describes. The desk’s read for them this quarter is unchanged: a clear website and a working lead form matter more in a cautious economy, not less.

What to watch next week

Earnings from Verizon on Monday and Coca-Cola, UPS, SoFi and Robinhood on Tuesday will test whether the consumer caution in the survey data is showing up in actual sales. The midterm elections follow the week after, and the oil market is already trading on what comes after them.

Sources

• The Associated Press: Wall Street mostly loses ground under pressure from rising oil prices
• Yahoo Finance / TheStreet: Stock Market Today, Oct. 23, 2026
• TheStreet: live market updates, Oct. 23, 2026

The Boston Made Newsroom publishes market coverage for general information only. Nothing here is investment advice; consult a licensed professional before making investment decisions.

Amazon wants to launch Prime Air drone deliveries from a takeoff and landing area in Westborough. The Massachusetts Department of Transportation has a message for the company: not before the state signs off.

In a letter dated October 22, MassDOT told Amazon that the FAA approves its drones as an air carrier, but the flights are commercial operations subject to state law. No takeoff and landing site can be established in Westborough or anywhere else in Massachusetts without a certificate of approval from the state’s Aeronautics Division.

What the state wants first

• An official notification and review request from Amazon, which the division says it has not received.
• Its own suitability review confirming the operation poses no safety threat.
• An environmental impact review.
• At least one public hearing before any certificate is issued.

The division said residents have already raised concerns about low-altitude flights over private property and possible conflicts with police, public safety crews and other drone operators.

The town has spoken, too

At a Special Town Meeting on Monday, October 20, Westborough voters overwhelmingly backed a bylaw restricting commercial drones. That bylaw still needs sign-off from the state attorney general and the Aeronautics Division.

Amazon spokesperson Lindsay Hamilton said the company remains committed to working with state and local officials and welcomes the chance to demonstrate the safety of its operations, noting Prime Air has flown in nine states with FAA approval.

Why it matters

Massachusetts is drawing a line that other states will watch: federal clearance gets a drone in the air, but the state decides where it can take off and land. For Amazon, the Westborough site is now a permitting process with a public hearing, not a launch date.

Source: Boston.com. Reported and written by the Ecosystem Intelligence Desk.