BFCM 2025 Blew Up: What Retailers Can Learn from a +320% Surge

December 04

Black Friday and Cyber Monday have always pushed retail systems to the limit — but in 2025, that limit moved dramatically higher.

Across Patchworks, activity flowing through our iPaaS platform surged by more than +320% year on year, making this our busiest and most complex BFCM on record. Black Friday alone climbed more than +300%, Cyber Monday followed the same pattern, and the full month of November rose more than +130%.

Together, these signals confirm a clear shift:
peak trading no longer begins or ends on a single weekend. It’s becoming a month-long operational marathon.

Here’s what we saw behind the scenes as operations moved between ERPs, WMSs, OMS, POS, websites and marketplaces across our global customer base.

🚀 BFCM 2025 iPaaS growth in numbers (vs 2024)

+323% growth in total BFCM activity
+305% on Black Friday Day
+318% on Cyber Monday
+326% across Black Friday Weekend
+209% throughout Black Friday Week
+130% across the full month of November

The spike was strong — but the bigger story is how long high-volume conditions lasted. Pressure on systems began weeks earlier than usual.

Customers moved early — and across more channels

The first week of November alone grew more than +200% year on year.
Three customer behaviour shifts drove that early lift:

1. Earlier buying decisions

Shoppers moved quickly to secure deals, avoid stock issues and reduce delivery uncertainty — an acceleration of the pattern we saw in 2024.

2. More multi-channel journeys

Customers switched between marketplaces, brand sites, social and subscription channels far more frequently. This created greater volumes of:

Inventory lookups
Price checks
Stock reservations
Order creation
Routing updates

3. A ‘don’t risk missing out’ mindset

High-demand categories saw more decisive buying behaviour, generating significantly more operational events per purchase.

Across the board, customers engaged with more systems, for longer — and this had a major downstream impact on every retail tech stack.

Fulfilment grew more complex too

Brands didn’t just sell more — they fulfilled differently.

In 2025, retailers leaned heavily on:

Regional warehouses
3PL partners
Dropship suppliers
Marketplace fulfilment routes

This created far more dynamic routing decisions inside OMS and WMS systems, and significantly more events pushed through to ERPs, websites and marketplaces.

According to our latest Retail Tech Report, retailers already cite POS (34%), CRM (32%) and eCommerce (27%) as their most operationally challenging systems when not integrated effectively — a sign of how front-end complexity continues to strain the rest of the stack.

What came under the most pressure?

Three operational areas saw the biggest year-on-year increases:

1. Inventory synchronisation

Real-time stock updates generated the highest load, especially during flash-sale windows. Inventory accuracy remains one of retail’s most sensitive (and fragile) processes.

2. Order creation & updates

Order-per-minute peaks exceeded anything seen in 2024, especially for brands running timed promotions or marketplace deals.

3. Fulfilment routing

As retailers relied on more fulfilment partners, routing and status updates increased sharply.

Social commerce flows, marketplace integrations and even legacy batch methods also grew — highlighting the blend of modern and historical processes still active across retail.

⚡ Patchworks stayed stable throughout the surge

Despite the +323% surge, Patchworks maintained uninterrupted uptime across November — with support CSAT remaining at 100%.

Our resilience came from:

Autoscaling infrastructure that expands instantly
Optimised, MACH-certified connectors that reduce noise and retries
Real-time visibility and alerting through Patchworks Core
A resilience-first orchestration layer that continues processing even when upstream systems slow

As Patchworks CEO Jim Herbert put it:

“This year proved how important that steady, unseen layer really is. Patchworks was tested more than ever and came out strong.”

A growing divide between scalable and brittle stacks

This year’s data exposed a widening gap between retailers prepared for modern peak conditions and those still relying on custom scripts, point-to-point connections or manual fixes.

According to the Retail Tech Report:

40% worry their stack will break during peak
48% rely on manual workarounds
43% fear a single surge could halt operations
31% lose measurable revenue during busy periods

Meanwhile, high-growth brands are assembling composable, modular stacks using best-in-class OMS, WMS, CRM and personalisation tools — increasing capability but also raising integration demands.

For these retailers, iPaaS is no longer a supporting tool. It’s becoming the central operational layer.

What BFCM 2025 tells us about 2026

This year’s patterns reveal four clear predictions:

1. Peak season will continue expanding

With +130% growth across November, peak is now a sustained pattern — not a 24-hour flashpoint.

2. Operational load will outpace sales growth

Every order now triggers more system-to-system events than before.

3. More brands will shift to multi-node fulfilment

Which will increase orchestration and routing complexity.

4. Automation will become a requirement, not an upgrade

Manual fixes, brittle connectors and custom scripts won’t survive BFCM-level pressure.

Final word: BFCM is no longer just a sales moment — it’s an operational stress test

BFCM 2025 showed exactly where commerce is heading: faster, more distributed, more complex and more connected.

Behind every sale sits a network of systems syncing stock, routing orders, verifying payments and updating warehouses in real time. When that engine is strong, retailers scale. When it isn’t, they stall.

Peak trading is evolving — and with Agentic Commerce on the horizon, the brands investing in stable, flexible, scalable integration foundations today will be the ones leading tomorrow.