The National Retail Federation forecast on October 15 that US retail sales in November and December will grow 4.2% over 2025 to $1.013 trillion (NRF). By NRF's count, last season grew 3.1% to $972 billion. The more useful detail came on NRF's press call that day, where chief economist Mark Mathews said nearly half of the 4.2% should come from real consumer spending growth, with the rest driven by higher prices (Retail TouchPoints).
That split should change how retail technology is judged this season. The holiday forecasts from Adobe and Salesforce give AI traffic a prominent place. Our view is that traffic, AI-referred or not, is the wrong scoreboard for a season in which price is expected to do more than half the work.
Prices are carrying the growth
NRF's forecast excludes auto dealers, gasoline stations and restaurants, so it reads core retail. On NRF's own split, more than half of the growth it expects comes from higher prices rather than more goods leaving stores. Mathews also said households will experience the season differently depending on income, wealth and exposure to costs such as gasoline and essentials.
A retailer that tracks the forecast will report healthy growth in dollars. That growth will say less than usual about whether its commerce stack sold more.
The buying decisions are already made
The supply side has largely closed. The Global Port Tracker from NRF and Hackett Associates, released October 8, estimated that August was likely the busiest month of 2026 for US container imports, at 2.3 million TEU (NRF and Hackett Associates). It forecast 2 million TEU for November and 2.02 million for December. Jonathan Gold, NRF's vice president for supply chain and customs policy, said imports are likely past the busiest part of the year.
With holiday stock landed, the levers left between now and December are pricing, markdowns, allocation and conversion. Those are where retail software can still change the result, and none of them is measured by how many visitors arrived.
The AI forecasts count arrivals
Adobe forecasts US online holiday spending of $275.1 billion, up 6.7%, and expects visits to US retail sites from AI chat and browser services to rise 130% year over year (Adobe). Salesforce predicts that 20% of holiday ecommerce traffic will come from AI chat agents (Salesforce).
Both numbers count visits. A 130% rise in clicks from AI services describes how quickly a channel is growing, not how well it converts or at what margin. Salesforce's own Shopping Index shows why that gap matters: global digital traffic grew 18% in the second quarter of 2026 while order volume rose 1%.
Salesforce's definition is also more revealing than its headline. The agent count includes consumer shopping bots, backend autonomous agents and scrapers that collect competitor prices for price-matching. In a season NRF expects to run largely on price, some of the agent traffic retailers record will be rivals reading their price tags. That traffic is a cost and a source of margin pressure, not demand.
We do not doubt that AI-referred shopping is growing. The point is narrower: visit growth is the easiest number to produce and the least informative about whether the spending behind it paid off.
The first test came in slightly under
One sales event has already reported. Adobe projected $9.9 billion in US online spending during Amazon's Prime Big Deal Days on October 6 and 7, up 9.2%, with discounts peaking at 19% (Adobe). Its final tally was $9.86 billion, up 8.5%, with discounts peaking at 20% (Digital Commerce 360). Spending landed close to the forecast, but growth came in below it and discounts ran a point deeper.
That is one two-day event, and reading the whole season from it would be a mistake. It is still consistent with NRF's view that price is doing much of the lifting.
A better scoreboard
The figures that would show whether this season's commerce technology spending worked are harder to collect and less flattering. They include orders and units from AI-referred sessions compared with other channels, and gross margin on those orders after discounts. They also include the share of measured agent traffic that is price scraping rather than shopping. Commerce platforms and analytics vendors are well placed to publish them. So far, the public forecasts measure the AI channel mainly by visits.
We think retailers should hold their own AI commerce projects to that standard when they review the season in January. A channel that more than doubles its visits without showing what those visits bought has not yet proved anything.
What to watch
The next checkable point is Cyber Week, from Thanksgiving on November 26 through Cyber Monday on November 30, which Adobe forecasts at $47.5 billion, up 7.4%. If spending again lands near forecast while discounts run deeper than expected, the case that this season is being bought with price gets stronger. If Adobe or Salesforce publish conversion and margin data for AI-referred traffic alongside visit counts, that will be the first public evidence of what the channel is worth.
Sources
- National Retail Federation. "NRF Forecasts 2026 Holiday Sales Growth as Consumers Remain Resilient." 2026. https://nrf.com/media-center/press-releases/nrf-forecasts-2026-holiday-sales-growth-as-consumers-remain-resilient
- Retail TouchPoints. "Will 2026 Holiday Sales Reach $1 Trillion? NRF Says Yes." 2026. https://www.retailtouchpoints.com/news/will-2026-holiday-sales-reach-1-trillion-nrf-says-yes/621759/
- National Retail Federation and Hackett Associates. "Import Cargo's Extended Peak Season Wrapping Up." 2026. https://nrf.com/media-center/press-releases/import-cargo-s-extended-peak-season-wrapping-up
- Adobe. "Adobe: U.S. Holiday Shopping Season to Hit Record $275.1 Billion Online, Rising 6.7% YoY." 2026. https://news.adobe.com/news/2026/09/adobe-us-holiday-shopping-season-to-hit-record
- Salesforce. "2026 Holiday Predictions: A Unified Yet Fractured Journey." 2026. https://www.salesforce.com/blog/holiday-retail-predictions-2026/
- Digital Commerce 360. "Amazon Prime Big Deal Days in October drove $9.86 billion in online spending, Adobe says." 2026. https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2026/10/08/amazon-prime-day-big-deal-days-sales-2026/