What's Hiding in the Holiday 2026 Data for Small Businesses
September 10, 2026
Small Business Saturday falls on November 28 this year. That's 27 days before Christmas and one of the tightest windows small businesses have had to work with in recent memory. If your plan still says "start in October," you're already behind it.
Holiday sales are projected to grow 4.5% this year [1], just under the 4.4% pace expected for retail overall [2], which marks the second year in a row that the holiday season has grown more slowly than the rest of the year [3]. Consumers' read on their present situation actually improved this year, even as their outlook for the months ahead pulled back [4]. Spending growth has held steady for higher-income households while slowing for the middle and lower ones [5]. Nearly 20 years as a National Buyer for retail organizations, and 10 years leading thousands of business owners globally through 37 Oaks, taught me that the businesses who do well this season will be the ones collecting and synthesizing this market's current data before they plan, not after.
What follows isn't just a forecast of how the season is projected to go. It's what's hiding inside that data, the insights small business owners need to actually navigate this critical selling season.
1. The peak holiday shopping season is shorter this year.
Small Business Saturday is still the Saturday after Thanksgiving, but this year it falls only 27 days before Christmas [6]. That's the peak holiday shopping season, the stretch when the bulk of gift-buying happens, and it's tighter than usual, giving you 2 or 3 fewer shopping weekends than a typical year. It's not only your planning window that shrinks, but your customers also have less time to browse, compare, and actually settle on what they're buying before deadlines force a decision.
37 Oaks Insight: A shorter peak season pressures both sides of the sale at once. You have less time to reach customers, and they have less time to shop thoughtfully. The businesses that make a decision easy early tend to win it before the customer runs out of time to keep looking. Start with December 25 and work backward: figure out your last order date, your last shipping cutoff, and your final promotional push first, then count back from there to figure out when you actually need to start. That's a different question than "when did I start last year," and this year the two answers won't match.
2. Big retailers are getting a head start before your season even opens.
Even though the peak season mentioned is shorter this year, the biggest retailers aren't waiting for it to open before going after their share. Amazon's fall Prime Big Deal Days is confirmed for October 7 and 8 this year [7], and Walmart runs its own Holiday Deals event the same week every year, expected to fall in the same early-October window in 2026 [7a]. That's weeks before Small Business Saturday, meaning a share of holiday attention and spending gets captured before the peak shopping season even begins.
37 Oaks Insight: your outreach, promotions, and awareness-building can't wait for the traditional peak selling season to start. They have to start when the big players start training your customers to think about holiday shopping, which this year means early October at the latest.
3. Tariffs are showing up on both sides of the register this year.
Most of what gets written about tariffs this holiday season stops at the price tag. Customers are paying more, and LendingTree's analysis puts the real cost at about $132 extra per shopper if this year's tariffs had applied to last year's season, with 46% of shoppers saying rising prices have taken some of the joy out of gift-giving [8]. What gets left out is the other side of that same transaction. Federal Reserve Bank of New York research found that roughly 80% of small firms in the goods and retail sectors passed on some tariff-driven cost increases to customers in 2025, while 60% absorbed part of that cost themselves, meaning most businesses did some of both [9]. Separately, 70% of small businesses report higher costs directly tied to tariffs and 60% have raised prices in response [10], and tariff payments per small business client jumped 142% year over year according to Bank of America Institute data [11].
37 Oaks Insight: Say the word tariff, not just "rising costs," on your pricing or receipts. Most competitors are raising prices quietly this year, so naming the real reason turns your price increase into a trust signal instead of a silent one.
4. Customers aren't giving up on their gift lists; they're financing more of them.
The instinct is to assume a squeezed customer buys less. The data tells a more specific story than that. Gallup's holiday forecast shows Americans planning to spend close to last year's near-record average per person [12], which on its own would read as resilience. Look at how they're paying for it, and the picture gets more complicated: 79% of shoppers planning holiday gifts expect to use a credit card, and more than half don't plan to pay it off in full when the bill comes due [13]. Buy now, pay later has moved from a niche option to a mainstream one, with Adobe tracking a record $10 billion in BNPL purchases in a single November [14].
37 Oaks Insight: the ritual of gift-giving isn't shrinking; the financing behind it is stretching. Offering a flexible payment option, or simply being clear about your return and payment terms, meets customers exactly where their actual behavior is this year, not where you'd assume it is.
5. Stores still win the dollars. Ecommerce wins the growth.
The instinct with a split like this is to treat it as a fight, online versus in-store, with a winner and a loser. It isn't. Roughly 70% of holiday spending will still happen in physical stores this year, and that share isn't shrinking fast. The growth, though, is happening somewhere else. In-store sales are projected to grow only 2.5%, compared with about 9% growth in ecommerce [1]. Read those two numbers together rather than against each other, and the real story isn't which channel wins; it's how to build a holiday plan that takes advantage of both the volume and the growth, in a way that actually fits your business's capacity.
37 Oaks Insight: the smartest plan this year captures both sides of this split. Keep your in-person presence strong- storefront hours, pop-up markets, wherever your customers already find you face to face, since that's still where the volume is. Pair it with a real ecommerce strategy, since that's where the growth is happening. A holiday plan built around only one side leaves the other on the table.
6. Social commerce crosses a threshold this year.
For a few years now, social platforms have been where customers discover products before buying them somewhere else. That's changing. US social commerce sales are projected to exceed $100 billion for the first time in 2026, growing around 18% [16], and TikTok Shop alone is forecast to reach $23.41 billion in US sales, up 48% year over year [17].
37 Oaks Insight: This is no longer marketing on social and selling somewhere else. For a growing share of shoppers, the platform is the checkout. If you haven't turned on shoppable posts or product tags, that's a real gap this season.
7. AI is not just your tool, but your customer's too.
Last year's advice was to use AI to work faster: automate the busywork, speed up your own process. That advice still holds, but it's no longer the whole story. This year the shift is happening on the other side of the transaction, because your customers are the ones opening an AI tool now, not just you.
AI shopping tool usage is projected to rise from 17% to 24% of shoppers year over year [6],
and shoppers referred from AI tools convert at meaningfully higher rates than other channels [19]. That means the businesses showing up inside those conversations are capturing a customer before a human competitor even gets a chance to.
37 Oaks Insight: your customers are increasingly asking an AI assistant what to buy before they ever find you directly. That means your product descriptions and website need to be as legible to an AI system as they are to a person, which is a different task than writing good marketing copy.
8. More small businesses can mean more competition than a year ago.
Nearly 2.9 million new businesses formed in the first five months of 2026, the most robust five-month start on record. A growing share of those are solo operations: the number of new businesses started by just 1 or 2 people, often leaning on AI to handle work that used to require a bigger team, rose more than 20% between early 2025 and mid-2026 [20]. That surge is happening at the same time broader job growth has slowed sharply, and labor force participation has hit a two-year low [21]. Part of what's driving the surge is straightforward: when the job market cools, more people build something of their own instead of waiting it out.
37 Oaks Insight: You're not imagining more noise in your market this year. Differentiation and an established customer relationship matter more than they did twelve months ago, because a meaningfully larger pool of new competitors is chasing the same customers you are.
9. Reaching a customer costs more than it did last year.
The cost pressure covered earlier isn't limited to what you pay for goods. It shows up in your marketing budget too, though the picture there is more mixed. Google search ad costs are still climbing, but the pace has slowed: WordStream's most recent 2026 benchmark report found costs rising only about 3% year over year, down sharply from the 12% jump the year before [22]. Meta's average cost per thousand impressions, by contrast, is still climbing fast, up about 20% over the same period according to Triple Whale's 2026 benchmark report [22a]. Both platforms are getting more expensive, just not at the same rate.
37 Oaks Insight: more competitors chasing the same customers is part of why this cost keeps climbing, so it's worth leaning harder this season into channels that don't scale in cost the way paid ads do: email to your existing list and referrals.
10. Shop-small intent is real and rising, but it still trails big-box pull.
Shoppers now say they'll direct about 41% of holiday spending to small businesses, up from 36% last year [23],
and NRF expects roughly 67 million shoppers to turn out specifically for Small Business Saturday [25]. But that same body of survey work shows only about half of shoppers plan to actually shop Small Business Saturday itself, compared with far more who'll hit Black Friday big-box deals [24]. The goodwill toward small businesses is genuinely growing, but goodwill isn't foot traffic. It has to be earned with a specific, visible reason to show up on that day, not assumed from the sentiment alone.
There's a second nuance worth naming too: big-box retailers aren't your direct competition in the sense of losing a customer to them outright; most shoppers do both. Every dollar spent on a Black Friday deal is still a dollar pulled from the same limited holiday budget, so you're competing for a share of it whether or not the shopper ever compares you side by side.
37 Oaks Insight: factor that into two decisions: when you run your best offer, not only on Black Friday or Small Business Saturday, and how you position it, built on value and story rather than a discount you can't afford to match.
What this means for you
This season is shorter, and it's starting earlier and earlier each year. Your costs are up on two fronts at once: what you pay to source, and what you pay to be found. The competition for a customer's holiday budget has grown just as much: more small businesses are chasing it than there were a year ago, and every big-box deal is pulling from that same finite wallet too. None of that is a reason to sit this one out. It's a reason to be precise about where the effort goes.
The businesses that do well this season won't be the ones spending hardest to be seen. They'll be the ones who already know their customer, who lean on a channel that doesn't get more expensive every time a new competitor shows up, and who take the time now to build a real strategy instead of reacting to whatever the season throws at them next. A little time spent with an experienced coach, mentor, or fellow business owner who's already navigated a season like this one tends to pay real dividends, often more than another dollar spent chasing attention.
If you want help turning any of this into an actual plan, here's where to go next:
37 Oaks Growth Lab: coaching, courses, tools, resources, and a community built for committed founders with big growth plans. 37oaks.com/growthlab
Programs: structured programs with our partners to help you build beyond this one season. 37oaks.com/programs
Helpful Resources: free tools to help you navigate different stages of your business growth journey. 37oaks.com/resources
37 Oaks University Bob & Weave Episodes: free episodes on operational and market insights from industry experts. 37oaks.com/bobandweave
Terrand Smith
Founder/CEO
37 Oaks
Who is 37 Oaks?
37 Oaks is a global commerce development company that translates the complex language of commerce, distribution, and scaling into something entrepreneurs can learn, apply, and build with — turning growing businesses into scalable enterprises and stronger economies.
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Sources
Bain & Company, 2026 Holiday Shopping Outlook: https://www.bain.com/insights/2026-holiday-shopping-outlook-infographic/
National Retail Federation, 2026 annual retail forecast: https://nrf.com/media-center/press-releases/nrf-forecasts-4-4-annual-retail-sales-growth-with-new-economic-model
eMarketer, Holiday Shopping 2026: https://www.emarketer.com/content/holiday-shopping-2026
DataReportal, citing Similarweb and The Conference Board: https://datareportal.com/reports/shopping-trends-planning-ahead-for-holiday-2026
Bank of America Institute, via CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/13/k-shaped-economy-middle-class-spending.html
Main Street America (calendar squeeze and AI shopping stat): https://mainstreet.org/the-latest/news/main-spotlight-preparing-for-a-unique-holiday-shopping-season-in-2026
Amazon seller confirmation of Prime Big Deal Days 2026 dates, via Mike Begg / AMZ Commerce Advisers: https://mikebegg.me/blog/amazon-prime-big-deal-days-2026 7a. Walmart Holiday Deals event pattern, via The Krazy Coupon Lady (2026 dates expected, not yet officially confirmed): https://thekrazycouponlady.com/tips/store-hacks/walmart-big-save-event
LendingTree: https://www.lendingtree.com/credit-cards/study/holiday-debt-tariffs/
Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Liberty Street Economics: https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2026/07/effect-of-tariffs-on-u-s-small-businesses/
U.S. Chamber of Commerce data, via American Action Forum: https://www.americanactionforum.org/research/the-impact-of-tariffs-on-small-businesses/
Bank of America Institute, via Colorado Biz: https://coloradobiz.com/small-business-optimism-costs-tariffs-2026/
Gallup, via Old National Bank: https://www.oldnational.com/resources/insights/half-of-americans-plan-to-take-on-holiday-debt-here-s-how-to-avoid-it/
AICPA survey, via Old National Bank (same link as 12)
Adobe Analytics, via The Daily Upside: https://www.thedailyupside.com/economics/personal-finance/shoppers-rack-up-bnpl-loans-to-pay-for-presents/
eMarketer, via Retail Dive: https://www.retaildive.com/news/tiktok-shop-drives-social-commerce-growth/807665/
Practical Ecommerce: https://www.practicalecommerce.com/5-predictions-for-2026-holiday-shopping
Nasdaq Economic Institute / business formation data, via Yahoo Finance: https://finance.yahoo.com/small-business/articles/business-formation-booming-driving-surge-160000470.html
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, via OneDigital: https://www.onedigital.com/en-US/articles/the-june-jobs-report-what-small-business-owners-should-know-heading-into-the-second-half-of-the-year/
WordStream by LocaliQ, 2026 Google Ads benchmark report (current CPC trend, with the prior year's 12% figure cited for comparison): https://www.wordstream.com/blog/2026-google-ads-benchmarks 22a. Triple Whale, April 2026 Meta Ads benchmark report, via AdManage: https://admanage.ai/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-to-advertise-on-facebook
Intuit QuickBooks, via U.S. Chamber of Commerce: https://www.uschamber.com/small-business/everything-you-need-to-know-about-small-business-saturday
NMI survey (dated March 2025, most recent version available; worth a quick check for a fresher 2026 release before publishing): https://www.nmi.com/about-us/news/nmi-survey-uncovers-surprising-small-business-shopping-trends/
National Retail Federation: https://nrf.com/blog/3-ways-to-support-small-retail-businesses-on-small-business-saturday
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