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By Raj Sangha, Global VP of Revenue, Publitas
Black Friday lands on November 27 this year. Most shoppers will have already picked where they’re buying by then.
202.9 million people shopped over Thanksgiving weekend last year, according to NRF. Up from 197 million in 2024. 84% had started before the weekend even began (that’s NRF’s own number, not a guess).
The season keeps getting longer, and it’s AI-driven
Deloitte expects holiday ecommerce to grow 7 to 9% this year, landing between $305 billion and $310.7 billion. Experian’s research found 45% of shoppers started before November last year, and 62% kept shopping into December.
Publish your seasonal catalog in September. Search interest for Black Friday deals climbs steadily from late summer. Adobe Analytics data, reported by Digital Commerce 360, found AI-referred traffic to retail sites grew 693% year over year in 2025. Those shoppers converted 31% better than everyone else.
Salsify surveyed over 1,200 shoppers across the US, UK, and Canada for its 2026 Holiday Pulse Report. 51% said they’d trust an AI agent to research and buy gifts for them. 66% of millennials said the same. Detailed product descriptions were the single biggest factor in whether shoppers trusted an AI’s recommendation.
A generic “Shop Now” banner gives a shopping assistant nothing to work with. Specific product details, real pricing, and real availability have to be surfaced. (Ask us how!)
Value, omnichannel beats the discount
Salsify found 39% of shoppers saw Black Friday deals as having real value last year, up almost 10 points from the year before. 22% of boomers didn’t even notice the Cyber Monday deals.
BNPL spending is climbing into the billions, and it’s moved earlier in the shopping journey. Shoppers want the financing option in view before they hit checkout, especially on anything over a couple hundred dollars.
Lead with why something’s worth buying. Put the financing option right on the product page. And don’t assume last year’s promo structure works twice.
NRF logged 134.9 million online shoppers and 129.5 million in-store shoppers over Thanksgiving weekend. The Sunday after Thanksgiving set a new record for in-store traffic.
People find a product on social, check the price on their phone, then buy it somewhere else entirely. Your catalog has to hold the same story, price, and offer everywhere a shopper runs into it. Mobile, email, in-store flyer, doesn’t matter.
What Publitas actually can do with your data
With Dynamic content, your catalog pulls from a live product feed, not a static file. Pricing, stock, and offers update the moment they change, which matters when Black Friday inventory shifts by the hour.
With our new AI- and data-driven shoppable experience platform, banners and product content update live and get personalized, so you’re not showing the same generic “Black Friday Sale” graphic to every visitor.
This is where it gets more interesting: through our partnership with Bloomreach, the same catalog can start reacting to who’s actually looking at it, not just what’s in stock. Dynamic recommendation widgets, banners, and overlays live inside the catalog itself, adjusting to a shopper’s browsing and purchase history as they move through it.
Bloomreach’s own research gives a sense of the ceiling here. Personalized audiences convert up to 27% more often than one-size-fits-all batch sends, and a recent Forrester study found Bloomreach customers see a 251% three-year ROI. Retailers using real-time personalization elsewhere have turned simple behavioral signals, like a customer’s typical shopping rhythm, into meaningful lifts in conversion and engagement.
What’s coming next is the ability to tailor that catalog more precisely to each shopper, in real time, at scale – and to take action with a single click, in real-time.
One catalog, every channel. Web, email, social, affiliate: same price, same message, no manual re-syncing.
You can test before you commit. Run experiments on layout and offers instead of guessing once and living with it for the season.
Instead of staying static, when inventory and competitor pricing changes by the hour, you can take action in the moment and stay relevant – every second.
Black Friday now runs for months. Treat your catalog like a season-long asset that updates as fast as your inventory does, and you’ll catch demand before your competitors even see it coming.
Sources: National Retail Federation (NRF) 2025 Thanksgiving weekend consumer survey; Deloitte 2025–2026 holiday retail forecast; Adobe Analytics data via Digital Commerce 360; Experian 2025 holiday shopping trends research; Salsify 2026 Holiday Pulse Report.
