Americans this year relied more heavily on short-term financing for their Cyber Monday shopping, and their use of buy now, pay later (BNPL) options proved to be a significant boost for retailers.
According to shopping data from Adobe, BNPL usage reached a record high, rising 4.2 percent year over year and driving over $1 billion in online spending on Cyber Monday. Adobe expects total BNPL spend to climb to $20.2 billion by the end of this year’s holiday shopping season, marking an 11 percent increase over 2024.
Why It Matters
The popularity of BNPL has soared in recent years, with Americans increasingly using instalment-based payments not only for larger, discretionary purchases but also for everyday essentials like groceries. This has, to some experts, been taken as a sign of the mounting financial pressures facing U.S. consumers in 2025. And while the payment method has allowed shoppers to spend at record levels in the holiday season so far—averting a feared slump driven by weak consumer sentiment—high levels of financing may have masked some of these pressures and the broader challenges for the U.S. economy.
What To Know
According to Adobe’s data, online spending on Cyber Monday hit a record $14.25 billion, slightly ahead of the $14.2 billion its researchers had forecast. This followed a stellar Black Friday, during which online sales jumped 9.1 percent to $11.8 billion. The five days that make up the Thanksgiving shopping period brought in a total of $44.2 billion in online spending, per Adobe’s latest estimates.
Ryan Close, founder and CEO of the cocktail machine company Bartesian, told Newsweek that his sales were “better than expected” this year, “especially given the challenges coming into the season.”
“This was the strongest Black Friday-Cyber Monday in Bartesian’s history,” he said. “Even with much lower ad spend and higher product costs, demand exceeded our expectations.”
However, some noted that despite major gains in spending figures, the underlying data may not be the cause for economic celebration that it initially appears.
“We are seeing a dynamic that looks like strength on the surface but is more fragile underneath,” said Brian McCarthy, a leading retail and consumer expert at Deloitte.
“Inflation has continued to push item prices higher, shaping how consumers allocate their discretionary spending,” he told Newsweek. “In our holiday research, consumers told us they plan to buy eight gifts this year vs. nine last year. That is an 11 percent decline in units while total gift spending is expected to fall only 6 percent. The net effect is fewer items, and higher spend per item.”
And the rise of BNPL this year has also been cited as a worrying indication that the American consumer, while still spending, may be sustaining sales figures through fiscally unsustainable means.
Tracy Schuchart, a senior economist at NinjaTrader, called BNPL the “elephant in the room” of consumer spending, noting high levels of usage among both high earners for discretionary items and among lower-income groups for essential purchases.
“Black Friday 2025’s record came from the collision of three forces: wealthy consumers financing discretionary luxury purchases they don’t need credit to afford, young consumers financing everything on mobile because that’s their primary shopping channel, and financially stressed consumers financing essentials just to maintain baseline consumption,” she posted to X.
What People Are Saying
Brian McCarthy, a retail expert at Deloitte, told Newsweek: “Higher BFCM (Black Friday, Cyber Monday) spending is not necessarily a signal that consumer confidence has turned positive. Instead, it reflects consumers concentrating spend in promotional windows. In our holiday study, value seeking households plan to spend less over the full holiday season, but they are shifting more of that spend into mid-October promotions and the BFCM period. That behavior boosts headline sales during peak events but does not resolve underlying concerns about personal finances or the broader economy.”
What Happens Next
Thanks to a “strong Cyber Week showing,” Adobe forecasts that online sales for the full holiday season will hit $253.4 billion, a 5.3 percent increase from 2024.
