Report Summary
Datos’ latest Top 10 2025 Black Friday Behavioral Shifts report (download the full report here) reveals major changes in how shoppers will buy this holiday season—and what eCommerce brands must do to adapt. Greg Shuey unpacks the data, explaining why projected spending declines, rising cart abandonment, and marketplace hopping signal a need for sharper strategy and better customer experiences. He outlines practical steps brands can take right now: optimize product pages, improve trust and personalization, get visible in AI-driven search, retarget effectively, and launch early holiday campaigns. If you want to protect your margins and stand out in a slower, more competitive Black Friday season, these insights will help you do it.
Top Ten Takeaways
1. Product Page Optimization Is a Critical Weak Point
Insight: Product pages were the top exit points (35–40%+ of sessions) across all major marketplaces.
Why It Matters: This is the decisive stage where shoppers pause or abandon the journey.
Action Steps:
- Audit PDPs for UX friction and missing trust signals.
- Add urgency, reviews, and clear CTAs.
- Use AI-driven FAQ and content personalization.
2. AI Search Is No Longer Optional
Insight: AI-driven search referrals nearly doubled YoY from ~4% to 8%.
Why It Matters: Over half of AI prompts contained purchase intent, especially for electronics and home goods.
Action Steps:
- Optimize for AI assistants (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity).
- Create conversational, answer-style content.
- Track brand presence in AI search results.
3. Marketplace Hopping Is Increasing
Insight: During Black Friday, shoppers visited multiple marketplaces before buying.
Why It Matters: Loyalty is declining; competitors are one click away.
Action Steps:
- Ensure offer and pricing consistency across platforms.
- Run omnichannel retargeting.
- Leverage feed-based dynamic ads.
4. Competitors and Deal Sites Are Now Key Traffic Drivers
Insight: Deal aggregators (Slickdeals, Mydealz, HotUKDeals) and other marketplaces drive significant referral traffic.
Why It Matters: Shoppers rely on external ecosystems to find deals.
Action Steps:
- Partner with deal/coupon platforms early.
- Optimize affiliate listings and price comparisons.
- Launch pre-event PR around promotions.
5. Traffic Spikes Don’t Guarantee Conversion
Insight: Despite traffic surges, visit-to-purchase conversion rates remained flat or declined.
Why It Matters: New or reactivated visitors diluted overall conversion efficiency.
Action Steps:
- Segment traffic by visitor type.
- Prioritize high-intent user journeys.
- Pre-frame education content before major events.
6. Search Behavior Is Getting Deeper and More Complex
Insight: Users performed 4–9+ searches before viewing a product.
Why It Matters: Indicates friction or indecision in product discovery.
Action Steps:
- Improve on-site search UX (synonyms, filters, autocomplete).
- Personalize results using behavioral data.
- Optimize internal search for long-tail terms.
7. Cart Exits Are Rising
Insight: Cart abandonment increased across all marketplaces.
Why It Matters: Even with urgency, shoppers hesitate due to shipping, price, or comparison fatigue.
Action Steps:
- Automate abandoned cart recovery flows.
- Offer transparent pricing and delivery details.
- Streamline checkout with one-click or guest options.
8. Average Purchase Frequency Per Buyer Declined
Insight: Shoppers made fewer transactions per buyer during Black Friday.
Why It Matters: They focus on one key item rather than browsing multiple categories.
Action Steps:
- Promote product bundles and add-on incentives.
- Cross-sell during checkout.
- Retarget post-sale for complementary items.
9. New and Reactivated Visitors Require Tailored Messaging
Insight: A surge of users hadn’t visited in 3+ months.
Why It Matters: These shoppers need reassurance and education to convert.
Action Steps:
- Launch tailored welcome offers.
- Reinforce trust, reviews, and brand story.
- Build onboarding and loyalty email flows.
10. Category Focus Is Narrowing
Insight: Search and purchase activity concentrated in electronics, home, and appliances.
Why It Matters: Lifestyle and lower-ticket brands risk being overlooked during big sale periods.
Action Steps:
- Pivot messaging around gifting and affordability.
- Launch early (pre-Black Friday) campaigns.
- Target adjacent demand clusters through content.
Video Transcript
Greg Shuey (00:00.815)
All right, so a company called Datos, Datos, I’m not quite sure how to pronounce that. They release data kind of every quarter on the state of search. It’s one of my favorite reports to look at. This year, they just barely released a report called the Top 10 2025 Black Friday Behavioral Shifts E-Commerce Brands Need to Know. I spent some time going through this. It’s quite a long report and I wanted to pull out kind of the 10,
key takeaways that I think are gonna be most valuable and will allow you to be able to start taking and implementing some of these things so that hopefully you can have one of the best Black Fridays ever. Kind of some preliminary data that we’ve received from one of our partners, No Commerce, which we’re gonna be doing a podcast with them I believe in the next couple of weeks, talks about how Black Friday spending is estimated to be down about 10%.
this year, which is a little bit concerning for brands that Concerning for those that typically rely on Black Friday Cyber Monday to bring a huge percentage of sales as well as quite a bit of margin and Net profit for the organization that can be a concerning number now will that actually happen or will people get in the holiday spirit and maybe put a little bit more on their credit cards or do
kind of the installment payment programs that are out there like ShopPay, AfterPay, those types of things. Who knows, right? It’s definitely third party data that they’ve collected through post purchase surveys, but I did find that interesting. But I think there are some really cool things that are gonna happen here or that we’re gonna cover here in the presentation. We’re gonna try to keep this somewhat short, because I don’t like long videos. let’s…
rock through these things and if you have any questions, please reach out or drop those in the comments section.
Greg Shuey (02:00.786)
See if I can actually get this to move. All right, again, the data sources comes from the data mapping seasonal shopper journeys. It’s a report that was released this month, October 2025. This compares shopper behavior data during Black Friday of last year. So November 29th, 2024 with an ordinary date, which is October 25th, 2024. So that’s before peak season really starts ripping for a lot of e-commerce brands. So again, I’ve got
10 of these that I wanted to share. The first one is product page optimizations is a weak point for a lot of brands. So the concern is that product pages were the top exit points, which was about 35 to 40 % of sessions across major marketplaces. So when people come into the funnel, they may come in through a blog post, they may come in through a category page. Once they hit the product page, they’re typically bouncing, which is, that’s where we make our money.
So that’s definitely a big concern why this matters to you as a brand is this is the decisive stage where shoppers pause or they abandon the journey So a couple of things that maybe you should be thinking about or or taking action against are You should spend some time auditing your PDPs for friction as well as missing trust signals now If you don’t have a heat map click tracking software set up on your website
now is the perfect time to do that. So go install Microsoft Clarity. It’s free. It’s not going to cost you anything. And use that to be able to start looking at user experience as well as friction points that may cause people to abandon.
Abandoned their journey at urgency add reviews clear CTAs I mean reviews are humongous if you don’t have reviews on your product pages highly unlikely that they are going to convert when a Potential competitor has a similar product and they have several hundred reviews. So if you don’t have reviews get those up There’s plenty of tools out there that allow you to do so Get those up send out email campaigns to people who’ve purchased frequently enticing them to come back and leave a review so that you can start to build those
Greg Shuey (04:15.734)
trust points on your product pages. And then lastly, use AI driven FAQ and content personalization. Probably one of the most AI friendly strategies that we’ve implemented for our clients across the board over the last six months is really digging in and understanding what questions people are searching for in the AI platforms. The easiest way to do this is to just go over to Google also and just type in your keywords and look for people also ask. Oftentimes those are the exact same questions that
people are asking in the LLMs, like ChatGPT, and if you can start layering those into your category pages, your product pages, even your blog posts, with a very good answer, you will not only help your users answer their questions before purchasing, which will improve conversion rates, but allow you to be able to start showing up in the AI overviews people also ask inside of Google and the LLMs.
All right. The second one is that AI search is no longer optional. So AI driven search referrals nearly doubled year over year from less than 4 % to 8%. When we look at our clients across the board, we’re usually somewhere around 5 to 6%. So it’s a little bit well smack dab in the middle of that, right? Although this isn’t a huge number yet, making sure that you’re properly optimized for AI search will allow you to
take advantage of that percentage of traffic that is coming to your website and potentially convert those and just know that you know as more and more people adopt AI you know that number is just going to grow and maybe we’re going to see a surge during Black Friday Cyber Monday. We’re just not sure right it’s just so new and so I think there’s definitely a reason to be concerned about that and to be able to shift a little bit of strategy to take advantage of that. Why this matters for you is because over half of AI prompts contain purchase intent.
especially for electronics and home goods. So if you’re in the electronics or home goods space, big opportunity for you. Action steps, start optimizing for the AI assistance. So your chat GPT, your Gemini, your perplexity. Create conversational and answer style content. So back to that previous slide, find those FAQs and create content around those. And then also track brand presence and AI search results. So you can do this in SEMrush, you can do this in Ahrefs these days. They both have a tool.
Greg Shuey (06:41.528)
and an add-on in there that will allow you to monitor those things. also, I’ve talked about it in the podcast a number of times, we use PEAC, P-E-E-C dot A-I to be able to track brand presence and A-I search results as well so that we can get a handle on what that looks like.
Alright next, marketplace hopping is increasing. the concern during Black Friday, shoppers visited multiple marketplaces before buying. Why this matters? Loyalty is declining. This should be a big concern for a lot of e-commerce brands, especially as consumers’ wallets and spending power is shrinking this year with inflation and all the other stuff that’s going on. Loyalty is declining. So your competitors are just a click away. If they have a better offer,
in a comparable product, likelihood of them purchasing somewhere else to save some money this year is going to be pretty high. So your action steps are ensure that your offer and pricing is consistent across platforms. I would also say consistent across the competition as well in order to make sure that you are as compelling as possible. You’re going to want to run omni-channel retargeting for your business, so across all the different channels.
and leverage feed-based dynamic ads as well. I think those are the big three that are gonna help you stay in front of your potential customers and be able to entice them to come back and make a purchase with you if by chance they do happen to bounce and go to Amazon or a competitor or whatever that looks like, okay? Next, competitors and deal sites are now key traffic drivers. I don’t think this is any surprise, honestly. When we look at the deal aggregators, this has always been the case.
for Black Friday, Cyber Monday is slick deals, my deals, hot UK deals, all of these different aggregators and marketplaces, they drive significant referral traffic. And so if you’re not present there, chances of you being able to take advantage of that traffic and convert more buyers is pretty slim. So I think it matters most to us is because shoppers are more more relying on external ecosystems to find deals. They can go right over to those sites. They can type in exactly what they’re looking
Greg Shuey (08:57.262)
for the brands and see what deals they are running, what the percentage off is so they can gather that data before they even visit your website. So a couple of action steps here is you should, wow, that’s a typo, partner with deal and coupon platforms early, optimize affiliate listings and price comparisons and launch pre-event PR around promotions. Those first two are fairly easy to do. If you’ve got an army of affiliates out there, especially some of these larger sites that do comparisons,
and guides and those types of things, make sure that you go out and contact those people and work with them to be able to promote your Black Friday deal. Same thing with the deal and coupon platforms as well. right, next, traffic spikes don’t guarantee conversions. I think that’s fairly obvious, but you’re gonna see massive traffic spikes over Black Friday Cyber Monday. So the concern is despite traffic surges, visit to purchase conversion rates remain flat or declined. That’s pretty concerning.
right especially the decline piece of that why this matters new or reactivated visitors are likely diluted overall or are they’re diluting overall conversion efficiency right because we’re bringing them back in or potential ones coming back in and you know again if there are better offers out there it potentially is hurting your conversion efficiency for the brand so action steps here easier said than
done on a couple of these right segment your traffic by visitor type go into Google Analytics or whatever analytics platform you’re running and segment your traffic there and specifically look at the buyer journey look at the conversion rate how many pages they look at on your website and get a handle on which ones are actually pulling down your conversion rate you can go back to last November and do this and see which ones are pulling down your conversion rate and then prioritize the high intent user
Put your money and your effort into those that are actually going to drive the best traffic the most relevant traffic the most buyer qualified traffic and Have the higher likelihood of converting on the backside. All right, and then pre-frame education content before major events like this, right? So make sure that you’ve got really great education content so that you can get people to consume multiple pieces of content You can have whole handhold them you can guide them through the buyer journey and by doing so you increase the likelihood of you
Greg Shuey (11:26.892)
being able to convert those people on your website. Alright, search behavior is getting deeper and more complex.
Kind of dovetails back into the last one a little bit. The concern is that users perform four to nine or more searches before viewing a product. All right. That means they are spending much more time researching before coming to your PDP pages. Why it matters. This indicates friction or indecision in product discovery. They’re just not quite sure. This also ties back into they’re less loyal than they used to be. If they were 100 % loyal to your brand,
These numbers would be lower, right? If they were loyal to the brands that they buy from, these numbers would be lower. And so there’s friction or indecision happening. Action steps here. Improve on-site search. Okay, so if you’ve got a little search box on your website, you want to improve site search UX. Make sure you’re optimizing for synonyms, filters, and making sure that you’ve got autocomplete set up. Second, personalize results using behavioral data. Again, dig into that.
behavioral data and see what people are doing on your website. Look at the Microsoft Clarity recordings and the click tracking and then making sure that you’re personalizing that. Optimizing internal search for long-tail search terms. More more people are looking for like a front-zip hoodie in this particular color in this particular material, right? So you want to make sure that when people are searching for that you are able to show them the best results.
possible. Alright another big one right here is that cart exits are rising. Obviously as you have a surge of traffic
Greg Shuey (13:14.592)
If people are viewing products, if they’re adding those products to your shopping cart and they are leaving, right, those cart exits are going up. So, cart abandonment, the big concern is that it’s increased across all marketplaces. Why it matters for you is that even with urgency, shoppers are hesitating due to shipping, price, or comparison fatigue, right? I think it is your best bet to be able to have the best shipping, the best pricing, the best offer so that
They don’t have to go shop around obviously you’ve got to be smart You’ve got to make sure that you’ve got margin baked into that the last thing you want to do is scale revenue With very little margin or net profit at the end of the day. So be careful Action steps here first automate abandoned cart recovery flows I assume most of you probably have your abandoned cart recovery flow set up if not get them set up Second go in and audit those as well. Make sure that they’re high performing so that you have the best chance
of being able to recover those. Offer transparent pricing and delivery details and then streamlining checkout with one click or different guest options that might be appealing to those individuals. All right, average purchase frequency per buyer declined. So the concern here is that shoppers made fewer transactions per buyer during Black Friday. That one actually surprised me last year.
This is critical and why it matters to you is they focus on one key item rather than browsing multiple categories. So they are shopping for that big expensive thing that they need to buy during this season, whether it’s for a gift or not, you know, whether that is a refrigerator or whether that’s a new computer or whatever, right? They’re focusing on that one key item rather than than browsing multiple categories. So action steps that you can take here is making sure that you promote product bundles and add on incentives.
to cross selling during checkout and three retargeting post sale for complementary items I did want to plug a Company called redo right here They’re growing fast and they’ve got a lot of really cool tools one that was demoed to me this past week by a member of their team was a custom It wasn’t a thank-you page, but it was like an order tracking page So when someone gets their email that says your orders on
Greg Shuey (15:40.164)
the move you can click on it you can track the order and on that page there was a significant amount of value adding content as well as cross cells.
Most people are gonna click on that tracking URL. They wanna see when their order’s gonna be there and you have an opportunity to be able to pitch complimentary products on that page to get them to make another purchase. So I think there’s some really cool things that you can do there. If you haven’t checked out Redo, do that. Tell them I sent you and they’ll take great care of you. All right, new and reactivated visitors require tailored messaging. The concern, they saw last year is that
surge of users hadn’t visited in more than three months. That’s a huge percentage of past customers or people who’ve engaged with your brand in the past. Why this matters to you is these shoppers need reassurance and education to convert on your website. So action steps here. Launch tailored welcome offers. You can launch an additional offer to people who haven’t been back in a while or haven’t converted in a while. Reinforce trust.
with reviews, brand stories, those types of things, and then making sure that you’ve got amazing new customer flows, onboarding flows, loyalty email flows, those types of things to be able to bring people back and get them to purchase from you again. All right. Another one that was interesting to me was category focuses narrowing. And we talked a little bit about this just a minute ago. The big concern here is that search and purchase activity concentrated on the
Big items like electronics home Appliances those types of things again people are shopping for that big deal for that one item Why it matters to you is that lifestyle and lower ticket brands risk being overlooked during big sale periods, okay? Action steps for you here is that you need to pivot your messaging around potentially gifting and affordability And don’t kill all your margin you still need to make some money on this, but you need to
Greg Shuey (17:51.138)
be super scrappy and interesting and different when it comes to your messaging and your offer. Launch early pre-Black Friday campaigns. I think most of our clients are launching their Black Friday campaigns like next week. There may be a few that are a little bit later, but we’re getting started early. We want to make sure that we stand out from the crowd. We want to make sure that we get in front of people before Black Friday when they’re doing these large purchase items.
getting adjacent demand clusters through content. And so if you’ve got specific clusters where we know there’s going to be demand again those big three maybe maybe you can take advantage of some of those demand keywords and content clusters and build some content around those. All right. And that’s all 10. I think that you know if if your brand could identify maybe five action steps across all of these. So what we have 30 action steps across 10 if you can identify
that you can double down on in the next couple of weeks, it’s gonna be humongous for your business and your brand going into Black Friday, Cyber Monday. So again, if you have any questions, you need support on anything, it’s a little bit late to get started with ad campaigns and those types of things, but if we have a little bit of capacity, if you need some support, we can spin up some projects to be able to help you with a couple of these things, awesome. If you just have any questions that can be answered or concerns that we can help resolve.
awesome. But just let us know and hope that you have an amazing Black Friday, Cyber Monday and absolutely crush it for your business.
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.