2025 has been a wild ride for retailers, and there’s no sign that things are about to smooth out come the holiday peak. Q4 can be make-or-break for brands, especially when performance has been sluggish in the preceding months.

But with widespread expectations that consumer caution will see a notable drop in holiday spending, while a condensed season will put inventory and promotional strategies under pressure just as retailers scale back purchasing amidst tariff-driven uncertainty, ‘winning the peak’ will be harder than ever this year.

No one can afford to take bumper holiday season sales for granted in this climate. A strong end to this most turbulent of years will depend on diligence, smarts and strategy – and prepping early to make sure you’re ready for all eventualities.

So with that in mind, here are three key trends to plan for.

1) Price Sensitivity

Consumers are tightening their purse strings, so much so, in fact, that PwC is forecasting a 5% drop in overall spend this holiday season – the first decline since 2020. Increased price sensitivity means the appetite for discounts will be large. But retailers would be wise to resist the temptation to slash prices across the board, and instead seek to protect margins with a more strategic programme of precision promotions .

This is the time to delve into your customer data and segment purchasing behaviors by price, promotion and timing. Who responds to modest discounts but buys early? Who is prepared to take a chance and leave it to the last minute hoping for the biggest bargains? Turn insights like these into a promotional roadmap, make a big deal of price drops, and target the right people at the right time.

You can also cover yourself by taking a good-better-best approach to promotions – different lines, perhaps differentiated by quality and/or provenance, with varying levels of discount available. This means there are always options for people with different levels of price sensitivity.

2) A Condensed Peak

For the second year running, the Black Friday-Cyber Monday (Friday 28th November to Monday 1st December) weekend falls ‘late’, on the fourth weekend before Christmas instead of the fifth. Analysts call this a ‘condensed peak’, as post-Thanksgiving spending runs more firmly into Christmas shopping. PwC forecasts that as much as 40% of all holiday spending could come over that one weekend.

Black Friday has become as much a digital event as Cyber Monday. But consumers are showing a lot of love for in-store shopping right now, whether that’s because they want to get up close and personal with items before they part with their dollars, or because they want more of an experience to add value to their spending.

Get ready for a big peak in traffic over Cyber Week. Now is a great time to review your POS capacity, service systems to check they are in good order to handle the extra load, and add queue-busting touchpoints like mobile POS tablets and kiosks ready for the rush. Aside from that, do what you can to make store visits an experience, with special events, product demos, sensory merchandising etc.

3) Inventory Under Pressure

According to one survey, 99% of retail leaders globally say their plans for peak season have been disrupted by tariffs and trade volatility. This is manifesting itself in various ways, including 7 in 8 retailers contemplating price increases to offset tariff costs, even though that goes completely against the grain of a price-sensitive strategy.

Another tariff impact is that fact that many businesses have adopted more conservative buying strategies to protect themselves against rising costs, either buying less or buying earlier to try to avoid future increases. Either way, this creates risks during peak season. Do you have enough stock to meet demand? How do you mitigate against a particular SKU taking off unexpectedly and selling out, perhaps driven by a successful promotion?

This underlines the importance of feeding inventory and supply data into your promotional strategy. Be wary of discounting anything you will struggle to re-stock too deep and too early, lest you disappoint and alienate customers.

But this is also a peak season to double down on effective comms around inventory. Make sure your monitoring of stock levels is on point, and communicate with customers early whenever an SKU is running low. Have a strategy in place for substitutions, and perhaps even price changes if tariffs affect costs when you re-stock.