Salesforce, the AI-powered customer relationship management platform, reported Monday that 2025 holiday sales online rose 7 percent to $1.29 trillion globally, and 4 percent to $294 billion in the U.S.
That compares to the $1.2 trillion in global online sales, and $241.4 billion in U.S. sales reached during the 2024 holiday period.
Salesforce reported the average selling price was up 7 percent year-over-year. The price hikes were largely due to inflation and tariffs.
Salesforce indicated that the results prove the consumer appetite “remained strong from start to finish.”
Salesforce’s holiday statistics are based on the Nov. 1 to Dec. 31 period, and the global shopping activity of more than 1.5 billion consumers across Salesforce’s operations, including Agentforce Commerce, the e-commerce platform for many retail brands including Saks Fifth Avenue, David Yurman and Pandora; Agentforce Marketing, a marketing platform for brands to send promos, messages to customers and to measure the success of their marketing campaigns, and Agentforce Service for customer service.
“The 2025 holiday season marked a definitive shift to a new era of ‘agentic’ shopping,” said Caila Schwartz, director of consumer insights at Salesforce, in a statement. “While shoppers remained resilient in the face of higher prices, the real story was how retailers leaned on AI and agents to navigate the holiday rush. Agents didn’t just drive $262 billion in sales through high-intent discovery; they became the operational heroes of the season — handling a 142 percent surge in tasks like returns and shipping updates. This wasn’t just a bigger holiday season than last year; it was a more efficient, intelligent one.”
In other statistics from Salesforce:
- AI and agents influenced 20 percent of all retail sales, fueling $262 billion in revenue.
- Shoppers referred to retailer websites from AI-powered search channels like ChatGPT converted nine times more often than those coming through social media referrals.
- Companies that deployed their own AI agents, including Pandora, SharkNinja and Funko, saw a 59 percent higher growth rate — averaging a 6.2 percent year-over-year sales increase versus 3.9 percent.
- December saw a 66 percent jump in the number of agentic AI-powered service conversations over November, while interactions during the week of Christmas grew 12 percent.
- More than $181 billion of global online purchases made between Nov. 1 and Dec. 31 have already been returned, accounting for 14 percent of all purchases and a 10 percent increase in returns from last year.
