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.

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