Adobe Analytics, Holiday shopping report: Online sales to grow 6.7% Y/Y

The forward-loaded discounting schedule it describes is a pattern that has recurred through recent holiday cycles: earlier and deeper promotions pull demand forward, flatter the Cyber Week peak, and compress gross margin for the promotional-heavy names even when top-line growth holds. The AI-referral traffic growth, however small its base, is the structural angle worth noting, since channels that convert differently from search and social tend to shift the economics of customer acquisition for the large online retail cohort. The established sequence is that these forecasts set an expectation baseline against which the actual weekly prints are then scored, with retail equities typically reacting to deviations from consensus trajectory rather than to the forecast itself. The follow-ons are the Thanksgiving and Cyber Week actuals from the same source, which carry the read-through to the broadline and marketplace retail peer set and to the payments complex.