Shopify’s Black Friday-Cyber Monday sales surged 27% despite brief site outage

Despite some temporary backend issues reported on Cyber Monday, sales on Shopify for Black Friday and Cyber Monday rose by 27% globally.

Shopify, the e-commerce platform that builds online stores for merchants, reported global sales of $14.6 billion through the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend.

Consumers on Shopify shelled out money to buy vanity essentials like cosmetics, clothing staples like tops and pants, activewear, fitness, and nutrition items, in that order, Shopify data showed.

Overall, it seems people still really like buying stuff when it’s on sale. Globally, during the big Black Friday-Cyber Monday holiday weekend, online sales hit $336.6 billion, up 7% YoY, while US shoppers spent $79.6 billion, up 5% YoY, per Salesforce data. Black Friday pulled $79 billion in global sales, up 6% YoY, and $18 billion in the US, Salesforce data showed.

Plus, Salesforce data pointed out that AI and agents influenced 20% of Cyber Week orders globally, or $67 billion in sales, while in the US they drove 17% of orders, totaling $13.5 billion.

System down: But not everything went smoothly during the shopping frenzy. On Dec. 1, some merchants lost access to Shopify’s admin panel. According to Mark William Lewis, founder of e-commerce agency Netalico, which works with roughly 30 Shopify sellers, the breakdown led to a loss of access for about half of the stores the agency handles.

“Our own tests confirmed that we also couldn’t log in to about half of the stores we support,” Lewis wrote in a text message to Retail Brew. “Based on merchant reports and our internal checks, customer checkout remained functional, but merchants were locked out of their backends until about 7pm EST.”

“During that window they couldn’t update products, manage orders, adjust discounts, and several APIs used for fulfillment were unable to connect,” he added. “While the direct revenue impact is difficult to measure since checkout continued working, the operational disruption was substantial.”

Shopify acknowledged a “system degradation” that impacted the admins of some selected stores, and said the issue was resolved in a post on X on Monday evening. A Shopify admin is essentially the backend dashboard where merchants manage products, process orders, track customers, adjust settings, and view store analytics.