The headline number and what it actually measures
Forrester's US holiday retail forecast, published October 20, 2026 by principal forecast analyst Jitender Miglani, projects total holiday retail sales of 1.1 trillion dollars, a 5.1 percent increase year over year. Ecommerce is the engine inside that number: Forrester expects online sales to grow 11.6 percent, and while ecommerce still makes up just over a quarter of total holiday sales, it accounts for nearly 60 percent of the incremental growth retailers will see this season.
That split matters more than the headline total. A retailer whose growth plan assumes in-store traffic will recover to pre-pandemic patterns is planning against a forecast that says the opposite: almost all of the new dollars this holiday season are showing up online, and in-store growth is comparatively flat. Capital and staffing decisions made on the assumption that physical retail is where holiday volume concentrates are being made against data that no longer supports that assumption.
The inflation caveat that changes the read
Miglani's forecast includes a warning that deserves more attention than it typically gets in holiday coverage: a larger share of this year's growth reflects higher prices than stronger underlying demand. That means a retailer or CPG brand reporting solid holiday revenue growth this January could still be seeing unit volumes grow more slowly than the topline suggests, a distinction that matters enormously for inventory planning and for reading your own quarter honestly rather than celebrating a revenue number inflated by price increases you made yourself.
The forecast also flags a widening spending divide: higher-income households continue to drive holiday spending, while elevated inflation and declining savings pressure lower-income households into more selective purchasing. For retailers whose customer base skews toward price-sensitive shoppers, this is a more useful planning signal than the aggregate 5.1 percent growth figure, which will look very different depending on which income segment a given retailer actually serves. A discount grocer and a luxury department store reading the same national forecast should expect to land in very different places relative to that average, and planning against the blended number risks both overstocking for a recovery that will not show up and understocking for the segment actually spending.
Why this forecast differs from others you have seen
Different forecasters measure different things, and the discrepancy is worth understanding rather than picking whichever number is most convenient for a board deck. Forrester's 1.1 trillion dollar figure and Deloitte's separate projection of 1.70 to 1.71 trillion dollars for the November through January window are measuring different scopes and time windows, not competing predictions about the same market, and neither should be read as a universal benchmark without checking what each one actually counts and over what period it counts it.
What is consistent across the major forecasts this year is the direction: double-digit ecommerce growth, a wider gap between high and low income spending behavior, and growth that owes more to price increases than to volume gains, whether or not individual retailers say so publicly when they report their own numbers in January. Triangulating across methodologies gets you a more honest planning number than trusting any single trillion-dollar headline in isolation, and it is worth the extra hour of analyst time before the number goes into a board slide.
The discovery shift Forrester is actually worried about
The most consequential line in Forrester's forecast has nothing to do with dollar totals. Miglani writes that product discovery is spreading beyond retail websites: shoppers now use answer engines for unfamiliar or research-heavy purchases, go to brand sites for expensive or already-known products, and use marketplaces for routine items. Owned websites, in Forrester's framing, no longer control the entire shopping journey, and a related Forrester prediction expects AI agents to take on more of the buying process over time, with discovery and purchasing increasingly happening outside any single brand's direct control.
This is the structural shift that should be driving technology roadmap conversations this quarter, more than the headline sales number. If a meaningful and growing share of product discovery happens on a platform a retailer does not operate, then product data quality, structured feeds, and presence on the answer engines customers actually use become core infrastructure investments rather than optional marketing experiments. Retailers that treat this as a 2027 problem are already behind the shoppers who are doing exactly this kind of research-first, decide-elsewhere shopping during this holiday season.
What to do with this before Black Friday
Pull your own traffic and conversion data for the last two holiday seasons and check whether the discovery-to-purchase path has already started fragmenting away from your owned site, even if your attribution tooling has not been built to notice it clearly. A rising share of direct-navigation or dark-traffic conversions, visits with no identifiable referral source, is often the earliest signal that AI-mediated discovery is already happening upstream of your analytics rather than a sign your marketing attribution is simply broken.
Second, separate your holiday revenue forecast into price-driven and volume-driven components before you present it internally. A board or investor update that shows 5 percent holiday growth without noting how much of that is price increase versus unit volume invites a harder conversation in January than one that addresses the gap upfront. Forrester's forecast gives you the industry-level cover to have that conversation now, while it is still a planning assumption rather than a results explanation.
