Marketplace Briefing: Amazon skips its Black Friday and Cyber Monday recap for the first time since 2016
This is the latest installment of the Marketplace Briefing, a weekly Modern Retail+ column about the ever-changing e-commerce marketplace landscape. More from the series →
Amazon broke a long-standing holiday tradition in 2025 by not publishing a post–Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales recap, marking the first time in nearly a decade that the company has stayed silent after one of its biggest shopping periods.
More than a month after Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Amazon has yet to release its customary post-event recap touting record-breaking sales — the first time it has skipped such an announcement since at least 2016, according to a Modern Retail review of prior years’ disclosures.
The omission follows a similar move in October, when Amazon also opted not to publish a post-event recap for its fall Prime Big Deal Days sale, suggesting the company may be rethinking how — and when — it talks about sales performance outside of its quarterly earnings.
“We were pleased with the strong response to our fall deal events, with customers shopping millions of deals across 35 categories including home, electronics, beauty, and apparel from top brands such as BISSELL, Beats, medicube and Nike,” an Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “Given the extended duration of our holiday deal events during the fourth quarter, we made the decision to incorporate performance reporting for these events in our quarterly earnings.”
For years, Amazon has used post-Black Friday and Cyber Monday announcements to signal momentum during the critical holiday shopping period, often describing the stretch as its “biggest ever,” without disclosing specific revenue figures. Last year, Amazon announced that its Black Friday Week and Cyber Monday holiday shopping event was its biggest ever compared to the same 12-day period ending on Cyber Monday in prior years. The deal event also saw record sales and a record number of items sold. Amazon made similar announcements going as far back as 2017.
Those press releases have become a regular part of the holiday season, offering an early glimpse into consumer demand before fourth-quarter earnings. This year’s silence does not appear to reflect weak sales, but rather a tighter grip over messaging, analysts say.
“Amazon is becoming more private with them,” said Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData. “They’re becoming a bit tighter about what they release outside of earnings.”
Saunders said the company’s biggest shopping events — including Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Prime Day — have become large enough that even vague commentary can create unintended consequences.
“I think them giving any direction or guidance, even if it’s just throwaway lines on sales growth or something like that, it kind of exposes them,” he said. “What they’re trying to do is really to go back to only reporting and giving guidance and indications during the specific reporting period.”
In other words, Amazon appears increasingly intent on reserving any discussion of performance for its formal earnings calls, rather than offering interim signals that could shape investor expectations or invite scrutiny.
“When they put out results, if they say they’ve had the best ever, it can raise expectations for what the sales numbers might look like and what the profit numbers might look like at the end of the quarter,” Saunders said. “And obviously, they don’t really want that speculation.”
The strategy also aligns Amazon more closely with its retail peers, many of which avoid commenting on sales performance between earnings unless something materially deviates from expectations.
“It brings them into line with most other retailers,” Saunders said. “The vast majority of retailers do report at the end of the quarter, and the only time they interrupt that reporting is if something exceptional has happened.”
The shift is notable given how long Amazon leaned on these announcements as a communications tool, particularly at a time when online shopping was still gaining traction and Black Friday traffic was more closely associated with physical stores. As such, the recaps have also grown less meaningful over time, according to Sky Canaves, a retail analyst at eMarketer.
“Taken together with that lack of an announcement around the October Prime member sale, it could be a signal that Amazon is simply moving on from putting out fairly vague press releases that have really offered very little in terms of meaningful performance or results that can be compared year over year,” she said. Those announcements typically relied on superlatives rather than data, Canaves added, a strategy that has become less newsworthy as e-commerce has matured.
“Typically, what it would say are things like, ‘We had another record-breaking sale,’ which, yes, we expect that because retail keeps growing, e-commerce keeps growing, and Amazon keeps growing,” she said. “Maybe they’re not getting as much traction with the media from these releases, because they don’t really say that much.” Canaves added that most retailers, including Amazon, prefer to save specifics for earnings calls, where performance can be contextualized alongside margins, costs and guidance.
The absence of a Black Friday and Cyber Monday recap does not appear to signal a weak holiday season. Analysts broadly expect Amazon to post solid results when it reports earnings in the coming weeks.
“I would expect that they had a very strong holiday season overall,” Canaves said. “Per our forecast, we expect Amazon’s overall holiday performance from November to December to be slightly above average for e-commerce.”
EMarketer predicts Amazon’s 2025 holiday sales grew 7.1% year over year compared to 6% growth for overall e-commerce.
By some metrics, the broader holiday shopping season still delivered record-setting results. Consumers spent $257.8 billion online from Nov. 1 through Dec. 31, up 6.8% year over year, according to Adobe data, marking the biggest e-commerce holiday season on record. The gains were fueled in part by a strong Cyber Week — the five-day stretch from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday — which generated $44.2 billion in online sales, up 7.7% year over year.
Currently, Amazon is juggling multiple pressures, including heavy investments in artificial intelligence, rising logistics costs tied to faster delivery and ongoing efforts to rein in expenses. In October, Amazon said it now expects to spend $125 billion in 2025, up from a prior estimate of $118 billion. Amazon slashed 14,000 jobs last year to improve efficiency in the AI era, and more cuts are expected this month.
Saunders is projecting solid profit numbers when Amazon reports earnings because of the company’s cost-cutting measures under CEO Andy Jassy.
“They seem to be keeping a very tight lid on expenses, and they have made some further cuts, as they were doing throughout 2025, so the profit numbers should still be reasonably robust,” he said.
What I’m reading
- A U.S. judge rejected Amazon’s bid to dismiss a proposed class-action lawsuit accusing the e-commerce company of price gouging during the Covid-19 pandemic, per Reuters.
- Walmart is running ads inside its AI-powered shopping assistant Sparky after testing the first ads within the chatbot last fall, according to Adweek.
- Amazon is pushing its in-house Nova AI models, but internal struggles to match Anthropic’s performance have left employees skeptical and executives worried Nova may not meaningfully differentiate Amazon’s AI products, The Information reported.