CyberWeek 2025 Surprises: Shifting Habits, Smaller Carts, Smarter Defenses

Every year, companies around the world focus their attention on CyberWeek, the period that begins with U.S. Thanksgiving. Containing such retail landmarks as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, this is the busiest shopping season for digital retailers — and therefore also an essential period for fraud prevention.

CyberWeek serves as a critical stress test for merchants and their fraud prevention systems.

The surge in transaction volume during this period can overwhelm unprepared sellers, forcing them to make tradeoffs between two key objectives: keeping fraud rates low and maximizing approvals of legitimate transactions.

In addition to packing more transactions into a short period than any other time of year, CyberWeek can provide surprising and novel results.

This year is no exception. Merchants cannot count on patterns holding steady from one year to another and must be ready to adapt both to evolving customer shopping behaviors and to new tactics fraudsters use to breach defenses.

CyberWeek is consistently a huge part of the retail calendar for the year, but not every CyberWeek is the same. This year, for instance, buyers have made some changes to their consumption habits. Against this backdrop, Accertify’s clients navigated CyberWeek 2025 with notable results and a few surprises along the way

The Biggest CyberWeek 2025 Surprises

• Accertify observed more e-commerce transactions on Black Friday than on Cyber Monday, even though Cyber Monday is traditionally associated with online shopping and Black Friday with in-store purchases. On this year’s Cyber Monday, Accertify provided fraud decisioning on 49.3 million transactions, with a total US dollar volume of $5.7 billion, while on Black Friday, Accertify decisioned 52.5 million transactions, with a total US dollar volume of $6.1 billion. In fact, this has been true in each of the last 5 years except for 2021, where Cyber Monday saw higher transactions than Black Friday (29.8 million vs. 29.5 million).

Source: Accertify client data, 2021-2025.

• Transaction volumes are rising, but the average spend per transaction is declining. On average people are making smaller purchases. This may be driven by factors such as steeper retailer discounts, free shipping offers, or simply the ease of instant purchasing. For the 5-day period that started on Thanksgiving Day and ended on Cyber Monday (November 27 through December 1, 2025), Accertify saw 216.9 million transactions, up 23% from the same 5-day period in 2024. However, average transaction size for the 5-day period was $107.38, down 14% from the same 5-day period in 2024.

Source: Accertify client data, 2021-2025.

• Travel and Entertainment bucked the trend of smaller cart sizes. Not every category saw the same smaller average purchase trend during Cyber Week, however. Retail and Airlines both experienced higher transaction volumes (up 11.4% and 19% YoY respectively), while Travel and Entertainment transaction volume was only slightly higher (up 4% YoY). While Retail saw average purchase size fall 9% YoY, the average Airline purchase size remained mostly consistent at down 2% YoY. Travel and Entertainment, however, saw their average purchase amount rise by 7% YoY.

Source: Accertify Client Data, Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday, 2024-2025.

• Cyber Monday’s peak shopping time shifted from noon last year to 9 p.m. CST this year. Last year, the most purchases occurred at lunchtime, but this year, the spike occurred later in the evening. It could be because more people are working through lunch and not free to do shopping until after dinner. It could be because retailers are extending promotions and sending push notifications later in the day to capture attention. It could be because consumers like to browse online deals while streaming movies on-demand. We just don’t know – but we do know that Cyber Monday saw an evening peak rather than a midday rush.

Source: Accertify client data, 2024-2025. 

• Accertify recommended rejection on 2.5 million transactions, of which clients have already flagged 24% as “prevented fraud” during the 5-day period. This represents a 22% increase over 2024 in confirmed fraud, and it is still early days. The total value of these confirmed fraudulent transactions was $104.3 million, a 14.6% decrease year-over-year—likely reflecting the trend toward smaller cart sizes.

Source: Accertify client data, 2024-2025.

• Despite a 23% surge in transaction volume over the 5-day period, the median approval rate reached 99.06%, up from 98.92% last year. This is an improvement from last year’s 98.92% and highlights how Accertify helped our merchant clients maximize sales acceptance and create a more frictionless experience for online shoppers.

Source: Accertify client data, 2024-2025.

CyberWeek 2025 proved one thing: patterns don’t last forever.

More transactions, smaller baskets, shifting peaks — and smarter fraud defenses.
For merchants, the takeaway is clear: the only constant in digital commerce is change, and that’s why adaptability wins.