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Rithum is where 41.5K+ brands, suppliers, and retailers connect to 600+ global channels every day. More than $1.5B flowed through our platform in the five days from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday alone.
During those biggest shopping days of the year, we helped clients navigate real-time changes in shopper behavior, channel performance, and category mix. Here are the deepest shifts we tracked in holiday buying behavior—and the moves you can make now to stay ahead of them.
Shift 1: Social selling surges 152%
On Black Friday, shopper spend through social channels more than doubled compared to 2024: social-driven sales were up 152% year-over-year on Black Friday and up 140% year-over-year on Thanksgiving Day.
And it wasn’t just impulse buys or viral gadgets. Ceiling lights and extension cords were moving just as fast as the usual social-friendly products. Shoppers are increasingly comfortable having their whole journey—from discovery to checkout—inside creator-led environments.
In terms of categories:
- Clothing, Shoes & Accessories took the top spot.
- Home & Garden outpaced long-time social favorite Health & Beauty.
- “Unsexy” categories like Business & Industrial and Parts & Accessories also ranked among the top sellers—beating out classic gift areas like Sporting Goods, Toys & Hobbies, Musical Instruments & Gear, Music, and Books.
The new flagship store is your customer’s couch. Shoppers bought almost as much on Thanksgiving Day as on Black Friday. Post-Turkey, living room scrolls are now a peak shopping moment.
If you haven’t turned on social yet as a channel, now is the time to jump in. We saw one client grow their total GMV 227% year-over-year during the Cyber 5, and most of that revenue growth was due to social selling—even though social was a channel they turned on less than 6 months ago.
Shift 2: Is Pre-Turkey-Tuesday the new Black Friday?
Black Friday keeps stretching longer and longer, and what used to be a day is now multiple day long events. Across key marketplaces, a cluster of early Black Friday events generated 36% more revenue than the actual Black Friday-day sales.
A few standout patterns*:
- In one case, an early Black Friday event actually beat Black Friday itself, driving 58% more sales than the main day.
- When you add up the three days leading into Black Friday (including Thanksgiving), they generated about three-quarters more sales than Black Friday alone.
- The Tuesday before Thanksgiving was a standout: for marketplaces running multi-day events, that single day drove almost two-thirds of Black Friday’s volume on its own.
This isn’t necessarily a surprise: we’ve seen sales pull forward into a longer window for the past few years, just like Prime Day has shifted from a single-day spike to multi-day, multi-period promotions that competitors pile onto. Black Friday is now just one chapter in a much longer promotional book.
What we are always evaluating is how well various peak approaches work for our clients. The big question here is, Do early Black Friday deals cannibalize the event, or do shoppers still show up?
This year, the extended runway paid off. But it can be a balancing act. Earlier sales give shoppers more time to research and respond to competing offers. Consumers know they can take a few more days to compare sales, and that those sales will be more aggressive. This intensifying competition in turn forces you to be more selective about where you place promotional dollars, as every click costs more.
But so far, the risk of longer Black Friday window (and resulting higher competition) seems to pay off well. The key is to treat it as a precision exercise in staying agile to changing demands and not just a longer period of blanket discounting.
Shift 3: UK sales up 27%; EMEA up 25% year-over-year
Black Friday went global a long time ago, but shoppers and sales behave differently everywhere. In EMEA, promotions are still more tightly concentrated than in North America, with the one-day-Black-Friday itself carrying an outsized share of demand. Across our network, Black Friday sales revenue in the UK grew 27% year-over-year and EMEA grew roughly 25% year-over-year. In contrast, 2025 EMEA Cyber Monday delivered a much more modest 4% growth over 2024. In EMEA at least, it seems that the big bang Black Friday event is still very much a thing, even as the U.S. shifts toward a more dispersed “Cyber Month” pattern.
Local regulations, cultural shopping habits, and varying levels of marketplace maturity all shape how and when shoppers buy. The lesson from 2025 early holiday sales is that brands and retailers operating across borders can’t simply copy-paste a U.S.-style playbook and expect consistent results. They need to calibrate timing, discount depth, and channel mix to local expectations, and plan around regional peaks rather than a single, globally synchronized event.
Strategy, data, and agility will always beat sheer scale
Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the Cyber 5 are still big moments. But the real story is how they now sit inside an always-on, experiment-driven, home-centered era of commerce. The clients we see getting the best bang-for-their-Black-Friday-buck treat this season as part of a continuous learning journey. They go into peak with clear hypotheses and guardrails, then evaluate spend ruthlessly, adjust in real time, and stay agile on everything from channel mix to creative to discount depth.
In this competitive ecommerce world, where every click is more expensive and every event moves faster than the last, you can’t just show up with the loudest promotions. You need a partner who can help you learn fast and move faster. If you want to test smarter, react quicker, and squeeze more out of every peak, let’s talk about how we can help.
Talk to our team*these numbers come from select marketplaces that ran multiple Black Friday events
