American consumers set a new online shopping record for Black Friday, spending $9.8 billion on November 24, a record for the famous sales day and a 5.7 percent increase over 2022, according to Adobe Analytics. Thanksgiving Day online sales were also strong, rising 5.5 percent to $5.6 billion, per Adobe, which predicts that Cyber Monday numbers will blow past both those days, projecting U.S. consumer spending of between $12 billion and $12.4 billion for another new record. A notable trend during the holiday shopping weekend was increased reliance on “buy now, pay later” deals.

Black Friday U.S. sales online and in-store rose 2.5 percent over 2022, according to Mastercard SpendingPulse, which reported foot traffic at brick-and-mortar locations up 2.1 percent. Strong categories for Black Friday were jewelry and apparel in addition to sports events and restaurant tabs. Beauty brands saw double-digit-percentage growth over 2022, said RetailNext.

Black Friday is considered the starting point for the holiday sales season through New Year’s Day and a shopping bellwether for the period. TechCrunch writes that the figures should “provide some surprise holiday cheer to retailers, which have been seeing, overall, sluggish growth,” citing figures from the U.S. Census Bureau.

“E-commerce, as a younger and smaller proportion of that (around 15 percent of all sales), typically does grow faster and last quarter also grew around 7 percent,” TechCrunch notes.

Salesforce gathered data from transactions for roughly 1.5 billion consumers for Black Friday and found they totaled $16.4 billion in the U.S. and globally came out to $70.9 billion, TechCrunch reports, noting that per Salesforce a whopping “79 percent of all shopping traffic — both browsing and buying — was carried out on mobile handsets.”

“Separate figures from Salesforce showed Thursday’s spend rose just 1 percent to $7.5 billion year-over-year; yet Black Friday’s online spending shot up 9 percent year-over-year, to $16.4 billion,” Axios writes. The Thanksgiving weekend shopping tradition “remains strong, even as retailers launch deals earlier and as consumers remain in a relatively gloomy mood about the state of the economy,” Axios concludes.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reports that traditional retailers are losing lucrative revenue from their own single-store credit cards “as Americans carry fewer cards and increasingly finance purchases with buy now, pay later providers.”

The shifting payment patterns “add to the challenges many retailers face this holiday shopping season as they look to clear out inventory and preserve profits,” WSJ writes.