Adobe Projects Record Online Spending for 2020 Holiday Season

Adobe has predicted that 2020 U.S. holiday sales will reach record highs with an increase of 33 percent in spending. 

The tech leader projects that sales will reach $189 billion by year’s end. If such an increase is achieved, it would be the equivalent of two years’ worth of growth in a single season. Along with the general rise in e-commerce shopping due to COVID-19, another main driver of the projected growth is due to an extension of traditional Cyber Week sales turning into Cyber Months. Adobe believes that sales times will move past the usual period from Thanksgiving Day to Cyber Monday, and instead, be spread out across November and December.

“As retailers adapt to consumers’ new behaviors in this pandemic, we expect earlier discounts, more shipping and pick-up options and uncertainty around in-store purchases to drive this year’s online holiday sales to record highs,” says John Copeland, head of marketing and customer insights, Adobe. “This year is unlike any in the past, and for the first time, we are no longer referring to peak holiday sales as Cyber Week - it’s now Cyber Month.”

As part of Adobe’s predictions, the company projects that online sales will exceed $2 billion every day between Nov. 1-21 and increase to $3 billion a day, Nov. 22–Dec 3. The most anticipated gifts expected to be bought on those days include:

Adobe gathered the data for its projections using Adobe Sensei, an AI and machine learning framework. The platform surfaces retail insights from trillions of data points from across Adobe Analytics and Adobe Commerce Cloud. 

Adobe’s projection aligns with other projections of an increase in online shopping for 2020 as a whole. EMarketer recently reported that e-commerce is poised to grow 18 percent this year.