Black Friday/Cyber Monday by the Numbers: Exclusive Data Insights from Loop

Every BFCM headline is about acquisition, new shoppers, new carts, new customers walking through the door for the first time. Loop's own data says something different was actually driving growth in 2024. Across that year's Cyber Week, returning shoppers grew faster than new ones on every metric we track: revenue, order volume, and average order size. The merchants who won BFCM weren't necessarily the ones who brought in the most first-time buyers. They were the ones whose existing customers came back and spent more.

BFCM 2025 pushed those numbers to a new scale industry-wide. Per Adobe's 2025 Cyber Monday recap, U.S. shoppers spent $44.2 billion online across the five-day Thanksgiving-to-Cyber-Monday stretch, up 7.7% year over year, including $14.25 billion on Cyber Monday alone. NRF separately counted a record 202.9 million shoppers across that same window, the largest Thanksgiving-weekend turnout on record.

At Loop, we get a proprietary view of what's actually happening behind those industry totals: real order volume, real GMV, and real customer behavior across thousands of merchants in the U.S., U.K., and Australia/New Zealand. Read on for the full breakdown.

The data behind BFCM 2025

Loop has been collecting BFCM sales and returns data from our merchant base for four years now, across thousands of ecommerce businesses in the U.S., U.K., and Australia/New Zealand. That means we can track granular year-over-year trends, not just a single season in isolation.

BFCM 2025 global stats

BFCM 2025 set a new bar. Across Loop merchants, shoppers placed 15.9 million orders totaling $1.94 billion in sales, an average order value of roughly $122. Those merchants also drew 12.8 million unique shoppers over Cyber Week, equal to 16% of all Shopify BFCM shoppers that weekend, a meaningful share given Shopify alone powers roughly 15% or more of all U.S. ecommerce software market share.

• Total orders: 15.9 million
• Total value (USD): $1.94 billion
• Average Order Value: ~$122
• Unique shoppers: 12.8 million (16% of all Shopify BFCM shoppers)

We're finalizing the same-shop cohort comparison, regional breakdown, and vertical trends for 2025 now. Until that lands, here's the most recent full picture we have, from BFCM 2024, for context on where things stood a year ago.

Last year in full: the complete 2024 breakdown

BFCM 2024 was one for the books in its own right.

• Total Loop Merchants: 4,044
• Total orders: 13.1 million
• Total value (USD): $1.62 billion
• Average Order Value: $123
• Loop merchant sales represented 14% of total sales volume on Shopify

Two years of BFCM growth: 2023 to 2024

BFCM 2024 vs. BFCM 2023

• Shopify Order Volume: 11.7M (+11.6%)
• GMV ($): $1.47B (+15.7%)
• AOV ($): $125 (+3.7%)

Growth held double-digit for a second straight year, even as it moderated slightly from the year before, a sign of a maturing base rather than a slowdown.

How BFCM performed by region: US, UK, and Australia/New Zealand

We serve customers across three distinct regions, which lets us see real variation in how BFCM performs market to market.

United States

In the U.S., consumer optimism reached 47% in the final quarter of 2024, its highest level since before the pandemic, and spending followed suit.

• Total Loop Merchants: 3,153
• Total orders: 11.5M
• Total value (USD): $1.44B
• Average Order Value: $126
• YoY (same-shop): 10.4M orders (+12%), $1.32B GMV (+16.5%), $128 AOV (+4%)

United Kingdom

British shoppers were more cautious, with just 16% feeling confident about the national economy, yet UK merchants still posted the sharpest AOV growth of any region we track.

• Total Loop Merchants: 146
• Total orders: 258.45K
• Total value (USD): £23.5M ($29.4M USD)
• Average Order Value: £91 ($113.94 USD)
• YoY (same-shop): 193.4K orders (+3.84%), $21M GMV (+18.5%), $107 AOV (+14.1%)

AOV for UK merchants grew 14% year over year, well ahead of the 4% average growth we saw across Loop merchants overall, despite the UK's lower baseline AOV.

Australia/New Zealand (AUNZ)

A mid-2024 Shopify study found 79% of Australian shoppers cutting back on discretionary spending amid cost-of-living pressure, and the data bears that out: order volume rose while average order value fell.

• Total Loop Merchants: 422
• Total orders: 741K
• Total value (USD): $106M AUD ($65.6M USD)
• Average Order Value: $143 AUD ($88.49 USD)
• YoY (same-shop): 568.8K orders (+11.6%), $51M GMV (+9.7%), AOV -1.7%

AU/NZ is the one region where AOV actually declined year over year, a useful counterweight to an otherwise all-growth story.

Which product categories won (and lost) BFCM

Regional differences aren't the only lens worth looking through. Category-level performance tells its own story.

• Nearly every vertical grew order count year over year, except Swimwear, which stayed roughly flat (~1% difference).
• Nearly every vertical grew GMV year over year, except Electronics, the one category in decline (~7% drop in total sales value).
• Jewelry posted the largest jump in both orders and GMV, up 33% and 39% respectively.
• Apparel held roughly 50% of total Loop merchant sales for a second straight year, and posted the second-highest GMV growth at 19%.

Why returning shoppers outspent new ones in 2024

The clearest signal in a year of data isn't regional or category-based. It's behavioral.

• GMV growth YoY: Returning shoppers +19.5%, New shoppers +13.4%
• AOV growth YoY: Returning shoppers +4.7%, New shoppers +3.2%
• Order volume growth YoY: Returning shoppers +14.1%, New shoppers +9.9%

Both GMV and average order value grew faster year over year for returning shoppers than for new ones. That's not just a trust effect. It's what happens when the post-purchase experience, especially what happens if something needs to be exchanged or returned, actually earns a second visit instead of costing one.

LSKD saw this directly. The apparel brand now retains revenue on more than half of its returns through Loop, and its team stopped treating a return as a loss to write off. "Loop's allowed us to stop thinking of returns as a returned item or returned revenue and start thinking of it as a returning customer," says Jemma Cumming, LSKD's Continuous Improvement Lead.

That reframe is exactly what the 2024 data above shows at scale: the returning-shopper premium isn't luck. It's the compounding result of every merchant's post-purchase experience, multiplied across a customer base large enough to move a global average. We'll know soon whether 2025 tells the same story, or a different one.

What this means for your 2026 BFCM strategy

If returning shoppers are already outgrowing new ones on every metric, the math for BFCM 2026 changes. Acquisition spend still matters, but it's competing for margin against a growth lever that's already sitting inside a merchant's existing customer base, one that gets pulled or wasted entirely by what happens after checkout: whether an exchange is easy, whether a return turns into a second purchase, whether the shopper who came back for Cyber Monday has any reason to come back again in January.

The data above answers what happened during BFCM week. What happens in the two months after is a different story, one that decides whether a record sales season turns into a returning-shopper premium, or just gets handed back in refunds. We'll be covering that side of the story in our Post-Holiday Returns & Sales Trends data, our Boxing Day by the Numbers breakdown, and our 2026 BFCM Prep Guide.

Book a demo to see how Loop turns BFCM's biggest sales week into a longer-term retention story, not just a one-week spike.