Salesforce predicts fewer discounts and more shoppers using AI to find deals for the 2025 holiday season.
The 2025 holiday season will be defined by consumers using artificial intelligence to shop, according to ecommerce technology provider Salesforce.
Salesforce’s 2025 holiday predictions are:
- Hyper-personalized product discovery is here
- AI agents will boost employee productivity
- Unified commerce supercharges sales
- Trade uncertainty will elevate resale
- Price and quality will drive loyalty
Like 2024, value and the challenging economic environment are top-of-mind for consumers. But a larger holiday shopping theme in 2025 is how consumers are leaning into using generative artificial intelligence to shop, said Caila Schwartz, director of consumer strategy and insights at Salesforce.
“Even more compelling and driving consumer behavior is the new way consumers are engaging with the internet and discovering brands and products, and that’s through these new tools going to market, ChatGPT, Perplexity, the large language models,” Schwartz said.
These generative artificial intelligent systems are changing how consumers shop both online and in store. In fact, 6% of U.S. consumers start their online shopping search with an AI tool, 39% use AI search at some point while shopping, and 39% of millennial and Gen Z shoppers will use AI search while in a store, according to a Salesforce consumer survey of 5,500 consumers.
What’s more, shoppers say they trust the recommendations. The top reason shoppers say they are using these systems is to compare prices and find the best deals.
Merchants may pull back on deep discounts for the 2025 holiday season
Deal finding may be needed more this holiday season, as Salesforce predicts a 2% reduction in holiday season orders using a promotional code.
Because tariffs are squeezing profit margins, retailers will scale back promotions or change the way they offer promotions, Schwartz said. For example, instead of sitewide discounts, merchants may just offer a discount in certain categories, or only offer certain shoppers a targeted discount.
“Ultimately they are trying to save margin where they can and trying to deliver on the customer expectation for discounting,” she said.
Because merchants might be scaling back their discount, shoppers may turn to buying second hand goods, Salesforce predicts.
Acquire shoppers now to make them loyal for the holidays
Shoppers today are deal and value focused, and are focusing their purchases on essential items. This was similar to consumer sentiment in June 2024, and led to pent up demand for splurge items, Schwartz said. Shoppers unleashed their wallets during the deal-focused days of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, resulting in incredible sales growth.
The 2025 holiday season may follow a similar shopping pattern, in which shoppers wait for Thanksgiving weekend to buy discretionary items.
For merchants to capture these shoppers, Salesforce recommends for them to bolster their loyalty programs now to keep those shoppers in their flywheel during the holiday season. Loyal shoppers will spend 20% more than a newly acquired holiday shopper, Salesforce predicts.
Salesforce bases its predictions on data analysis from its commerce, marketing and service clouds.
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