Deloitte: Holiday e-commerce to reach up to $319B in 2026–27

Deloitte expects U.S. shoppers to spend between $316.1 billion and $318.9 billion online between November 2026 and January 2027. That is growth of 7.5% to 8.4% over last season, Retail Dive's Lara Ewen reported on Sept. 10, and it sits well above the 4% to 4.8% Deloitte projects for holiday retail as a whole, which the firm puts at $1.7 trillion to $1.71 trillion.

Two ranges, one gap. E-commerce growth is expected to outpace overall retail sales growth this holiday season, according to Retail Dive. For the person who signs the peak-season staffing plan at a fulfillment center, that gap is the forecast. The channel is expected to grow up to 8.4%, aided in part by consumers' embrace of digital tools such as artificial intelligence, according to Retail Dive.

Last season came in above Deloitte's own range

The base Deloitte is growing from is stronger than the firm expected a year ago. Holiday sales from November 2025 through January 2026 rose 4.1% to $1.63 trillion, seasonally adjusted and excluding autos and gasoline, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures cited by Retail Dive.

Deloitte's fall 2025 forecast had called for overall growth of just 2.9% to 3.4%, down from 4.2% in 2024, Brian Warmoth reported for Digital Commerce 360 last October. Last season's actual growth of 4.1%, by Census Bureau count, landed above that range.

That matters for how an operator reads this year's numbers. A forecast range is a planning input, and last season's result came in above Deloitte's range. Deloitte's new range, 4% to 4.8%, starts right about where last year actually landed, which suggests the firm sees momentum carrying over rather than fading.

On the online side, Deloitte's 2025 forecast projected growth of up to 9% to between $305 billion and $310.7 billion, per Digital Commerce 360. This year's range of $316.1 billion to $318.9 billion is a modestly higher dollar ceiling at a slightly lower growth rate. Whether that reflects a larger base or a cooler outlook is not something Deloitte spelled out in the reporting available.

Deloitte ties the online gap to AI-assisted research and checkout

Akrur Barua, an economist at Deloitte Insights, attributed the e-commerce outperformance to consumers' continued use of digital tools to research, compare and complete purchases across every category, in a statement cited by Retail Dive. Retail Dive framed the forecast around artificial intelligence becoming a more embedded part of how people shop.

The prior season gives that claim a baseline. A Deloitte survey ahead of the 2025 holidays found 33% of U.S. consumers expected to use generative AI tools at some point in their shopping process, according to Digital Commerce 360. Salesforce's 2025 projection, also cited by Digital Commerce 360, put the global online sales that AI and agents could influence at $263 billion, with $51 billion of that in the U.S.

Retailers were already building for it. Williams-Sonoma, Pandora and SharkNinja all expanded AI tooling on their e-commerce sites before the 2025 season, Digital Commerce 360 reported, and Adobe and Salesforce kept adding generative features to their commerce platforms.

A third of shoppers using AI to research a purchase means a third of shoppers whose first impression of a product may be formed by a machine reading the product page, not a person looking at it. For merchandising and digital teams, that turns product data hygiene, attribute completeness, pricing feeds and inventory accuracy into a conversion variable rather than a back-office chore. The forecast does not quantify that link; it does make the question worth asking before the November traffic arrives.

For retailers whose online growth already runs ahead of their store growth, Deloitte's range is a benchmark. Landing inside 7.5% to 8.4% would mean keeping pace with the market. Landing below it while total sales hold at 4% or better would point to a channel-mix problem rather than a demand problem.

Mobile, installment plans and secondhand: what last fall's forecasts add

Deloitte's number is a headline total. The 2025 forecasts from other firms, as compiled by Digital Commerce 360, describe the shape underneath it.

Adobe projected that 56.1% of online sales in the 2025 holiday weeks would come from mobile devices, worth $142.7 billion and up 8.5% from the year before. Adobe also expected buy-now-pay-later options to carry $20.2 billion of online purchases across November and December 2025, about $2 billion more than in 2024. If the majority of holiday orders arrive from a phone, then mobile checkout performance, not desktop, is the load test that counts.

Discounting was expected to run deeper and start earlier. Salesforce projected an average discount rate of 29% across the U.S. and Canada during the five days from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday in 2025, higher than 2024, per Digital Commerce 360. Cyber Monday's share of those five days' online sales slipped to 32.4% in 2024 from 32.8% in 2023, and October promotions from Amazon, Walmart and Target were pulling the season's start forward.

Then there is resale. ThredUp's 2025 Consumer Holiday Report, cited by Digital Commerce 360, found consumers planned to put almost 40% of their holiday budgets toward secondhand gifts, up from a typical 30%. That figure deserves a caveat the headline number does not carry: it measures stated intention, and the source offered no follow-through data on what shoppers actually spent. A category planner should treat it as a signal to watch, not a share to bake into an open-to-buy.

From $124 billion to $319 billion, at a slower clip

The long view puts Deloitte's growth rate in perspective. In November 2018, Adobe forecast U.S. online holiday sales for November and December of that year at $124.1 billion, up 14.8%, with about one in six retail dollars spent online, Retail Dive's Daphne Howland reported at the time. Overall holiday sales that year were expected to grow 4.5%.

The comparison is not exact. Adobe's 2018 window ran two months and Deloitte's 2026 window runs three. Even so, the direction is clear: Adobe's 2018 forecast was $124.1 billion at 14.8% growth, and Deloitte's 2026 forecast runs up to $318.9 billion at 7.5% to 8.4% growth. That combination is what a maturing channel looks like.

For an operator, slower percentage growth on a much larger base is not a softer season. Growth of 7.5% to 8.4% on a forecast of more than $316 billion still means a large volume of parcels, and those parcels have to be picked, packed and delivered inside the same compressed window between Thanksgiving and the last shipping cutoff.

The forecasts still to come

Deloitte is not the only forecaster in the field. Last year Salesforce's final holiday projection landed at the end of September and Adobe's annual forecast followed in early October, according to Digital Commerce 360's coverage. If that cadence holds, the next two to six weeks should bring independent numbers on mobile share, installment volume and AI-influenced sales to set against Deloitte's range.

The first real test of the forecast itself comes later. Deloitte's forecast covers November 2026 through January 2027, according to Retail Dive, so the final tally will not be in until the season closes.