Dive Brief:
- Black Friday e-commerce retail sales, excluding automotives, increased 10.4% year over year while in-store sales grew more conservatively at 1.7%, per Mastercard’s SpendingPulse preliminary data released Saturday.
- In-store foot traffic from Black Friday and Saturday declined 5.3% year over year, per early data released Sunday from RetailNext. The tech company previously reported that store traffic on Friday declined 3.6% year over year, whereas data from Passby suggests store traffic grew 1.17%.
- By category, Mastercard found that apparel spending grew by 5.7%, including 6.1% online growth. Salesforce data for U.S. online sales found that luxury apparel and accessories, as well as active apparel and footwear, were the top-performing categories for Black Friday itself and the weekend that followed.
Dive Insight:
Black Friday has seen a decline in the once-frantic, doorbuster approach to shopping in stores, though shoppers are still spending in general.
U.S. retail sales across channels grew 4.1% on Black Friday compared to last year, according to Mastercard. The credit card company in 2024 reported that retail sales in the country grew 3.4%.
The Midwest saw the sharpest store traffic decline across Friday and Saturday compared to the rest of the U.S., per RetailNext, largely due to a snowstorm that swept through the region.
Some retailers on Black Friday lured shoppers to stores with exclusive giveaways, including Target, which gave a free limited-edition tote bag filled with products to some customers. The mass merchant on average saw 150 shoppers waiting at store openings for its in-store giveaway, and some locations saw almost 500 guests waiting in line, per details the mass retailer shared with Retail Dive.
Apparel’s performance for the highly anticipated shopping event comes after a tumultuous year for the category. With a swift change in global trade policy in 2025, apparel has been one of the product categories hardest hit by heightened tariff rates.
The athletics category specifically has changed in recent years, with several popular brands pushing the category into athleisure and now moving into traditional apparel.
“Anecdotally, the top categories featured most by the retailers I visited in-store or online were apparel, fragrances, kitchen appliances (especially Ninja), and consumer electronics (especially Apple),” Gartner Analyst Brad Jashinsky said in emailed comments Friday afternoon. “Most of the affordable specialty apparel retailers offered the same large percentage off deals for the 2025 Black Friday weekend as they did in 2024.”
RetailNext data found that apparel’s in-store traffic was down 0.7% on Black Friday year over year, or nearly flat, but outperformed other categories such as home, and health and beauty. Meanwhile, Shopify’s current data reports that activewear pants, as well as hoodies and sweatshirts, are within the top selling product categories from the Black Friday weekend.