API traffic on Black Friday 2025 climbs 33% year over year to 4.6 billion calls

Black Friday has evolved far beyond its roots in doorbusters and overnight lines. What began as a single in-store event has grown into a multi-week, global shopping season where the line between in-person and digital experiences has nearly disappeared.

Last year, when I wrote about Black Friday on Contentful, we saw strong double-digit growth in traffic across our platform. This year’s results show that momentum is not slowing down. If anything, retailers are relying even more on digital experiences to reach customers wherever they are.

The evidence is clear in how often retailers’ digital experiences call Contentful’s Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). In 2025, Contentful’s Content Delivery APIs handled 4.6 billion requests across the retail category on Black Friday alone, a 33% year-over-year increase from 2024, and 4.3 billion requests on Cyber Monday, a 31% uplift from 2024.* 

To put that volume in perspective, each shopping journey is made up of dozens or even hundreds of individual content requests. Every product detail, image, price, or promotion a shopper sees comes through as one or more API calls. When you add that up across billions of calls in a single weekend, you are looking at a very large number of individual shopping journeys powered by Contentful.

In other words, our platform is delivering content to a meaningful share of the global online population in just a few days, highlighting the massive scale of shopping activity our customers are driving.

What’s behind every API call

So, what exactly is an API call, and what does it mean in the context of holiday shopping?

An API call is a request to retrieve content from the Contentful Platform and deliver it to an app, website, or other digital channel. Every time a shopper loads a product page, checks an item price, or reads a review, that interaction is powered by one or more API calls.

APIs function like the invisible wiring behind every digital shopping experience. When someone taps “add to cart,” that action sends a request through APIs to quickly pull the right content and experiences into view.

Moreover, APIs are how brands deliver personalized, high-performing content at scale. They provide the speed, reliability, and consistency retailers depend on when millions of shoppers are browsing and buying at the same time during peaks like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

A closer look at Black Friday and Cyber Monday data

Data from Contentful’s Content Delivery APIs shows a steady rise in delivery requests for both Black Friday and Cyber Monday, reflecting an increasingly digital-first, always-on shopping environment. From 2024 to 2025, retail API traffic on these two days grew significantly, with the strongest gains on Black Friday.

• On Black Friday 2025 (November 28), Contentful supported 4.6 billion delivery requests across the retail category, up from 3.4 billion in 2024.

• On Cyber Monday 2025 (December 1), Contentful supported 4.3 billion delivery requests, an increase from 3.2 billion in 2024.

For broader context, on an average day we support around 5.4 billion delivery calls across all industries and categories.

These increases are not just a sign that more retailers are using Contentful. They also reflect higher per-customer traffic as shoppers spend more time researching, comparing, and transacting online. Every additional product viewed, store locator used, or shipping option checked translates into more API calls, and our data shows that customers are leaning into these digital touchpoints more than ever.

Resilience during sustained, high-intent traffic

This period is essential for both our customers and their customers, so I’m proud to share that we maintained our 99.99% uptime for all Contentful customers on both Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

But resilience to high traffic can’t be limited to a single long weekend. As more shoppers buy online throughout the season, retailers are seeing new peaks emerge around regional events, brand-specific promotions, and fast-growing global holidays.

For example, we saw 4.2 billion delivery requests across the retail category on Wednesday, November 26, which indicated a spike before the bargain-hunting kicked off in earnest.

Together, these emerging shopping moments turn what used to be a single weekend spike into a season of sustained, high-intent traffic. For retailers, that means digital infrastructure must be ready for peak conditions far beyond Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Contentful Timeline: Spotlight feature built for big shopping moments

As more shopping moves online and consumers expect fast, consistent experiences across every channel, managing content at scale becomes increasingly complex. Seasonal promotions, flash sales, regional campaigns, product launches, and homepage updates add up quickly — especially when multiple teams are updating content across markets at the same time.

Launched in October, Timeline was designed specifically to meet that challenge for modern commerce teams. Timeline enables you to plan, queue, and schedule multiple future states of your digital experiences, like a series of homepage and product page updates for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, so high-traffic campaigns roll out automatically without publishing conflicts, last-minute scrambles, or downtime.

Marketing teams at Rituals Cosmetics, a Contentful customer, are already using Timeline.

“As we start rolling out Timeline, we gain confidence by previewing and staging homepage launches in advance,” a spokesperson shared with us. “We can line up multiple campaigns across markets, knowing every regional detail is ready. It also keeps busy periods less stressful and makes collaboration across teams much easier.”

For teams navigating these peak periods at scale, Timeline removes friction from the publishing process and ensures content goes live exactly when intended, so there’s no time lost and no surprise conflicts during critical shopping moments.

Interactive Demo: Timeline

Schedule and preview multiple future versions of the same entry, all in one place.

Looking ahead

Black Friday and Cyber Monday may still dominate the headlines, as we can see from statistics released by Shopify, which reported that its merchants generated a record $14.6 billion in Black Friday–Cyber Monday sales.

But the digital shopping season now stretches across weeks and around the globe. For retailers, growing API volume is more than a technical metric; it’s evidence that content delivery has become central to how customers discover, evaluate, and purchase products. That’s why technology and business leaders strive to reduce operational risk during the most revenue-intensive weeks of the year.

As shopping behavior continues to shift, the technology behind these experiences needs to be intelligently powered, seamlessly delivered, and ready for whatever peak comes next. Whether it’s a global shopping event or a single tap in a local app, our goal at Contentful remains the same: to deliver content instantly, reliably, and at scale, no matter how many billions of calls come through.

If you want to ensure your content infrastructure is prepared for the next peak shopping moment, contact our sales team for a tailored demonstration of how Contentful can support your strategy.

A note on the data

• The 2025 data points reflect the total number of successful delivery calls indexed as of Wednesday, December 3, 2025. 

• The 2024 data points reflect the total number of successful delivery calls indexed as of our current view. This figure is higher than reported in December 2024 because additional calls were fully indexed and reconciled since then. Year-end indexing captures late-arriving or previously unprocessed calls. The increase reflects data completeness, not unexpected growth.

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