Cyberweek 2025: Key Trends in Payments Testing

Dean Hickman-Smith , CRO, Testlio

December 8th, 2025

For retail engineering and QA teams, this holiday season was a stress test of systems not yet built for AI-accelerated buying behavior, mobile-first commerce, and increasingly complex payment options.

Many analysts initially expected a weak season. Rising tariffs, inflation, fewer discounts, and conservative consumer sentiment all pointed toward softer spending. Early data supported this. 

A PYMNTS Intelligence report found that Black Friday foot traffic was down 7%, and 37% of consumers reported purchasing fewer items compared to last year.

But when the numbers closed, the story flipped. Black Friday sales surged to $11.8B, a new record. Not only did demand return, but how people bought completely changed.

Below are the defining payment and testing trends that shaped Cyberweek 2025 and what they mean for the year ahead.

AI Has Rewritten the E-Commerce Playbook

AI has evolved from a discovery tool to an active decision-maker in the shopping journey.

• Adobe Analytics Data reported that AI assistants like Amazon Rufus and retail chatbots drove an 805% increase in traffic to merchants since 2024.
• Salesforce found that 39% of shoppers already use AI to find deals, compare items, and make choices.
• In the same report, Salesforce also shared that AI agents contributed to $14.2B in Black Friday sales on their own.

These trends, while not surprising, create new challenges for retail teams. AI does not follow the predictable paths that traditional shoppers do. It sends customers into the checkout flow through faster jumps, shorter decision windows, and less consistent patterns. That means your payments stack needs to hold up under traffic that feels more erratic, more compressed, and more sensitive to latency.

AI-driven sessions also behave differently when it comes to promotions, loyalty logic, and payment selection. When an assistant builds a cart, applies a discount, or recommends a payment method, the underlying flows can look nothing like your historical baselines.

If your QA strategy isn’t prepared for this variability, failures surface only during peak load, the worst time to discover them.

AI-driven commerce is not just a CX problem, it is a payment reliability problem.

Mobile Spend Hit New Highs

According to Adobe, 2025 is expected to be the first year when mobile accounts for 56% of all online spend. Seven in ten retail site visits now take place on phones, which means most holiday purchases start and end on a mobile device. 

Customers shop on aging phones, new OS versions, patchy networks, throttled data plans, and a mix of payment options that behave differently across regions. These conditions affect everything from authentication to issuer response times.

Mobile also introduces unique payment risks:

• Wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal OneTouch) dominate
• Autofill alters checkout paths
• Network quality directly impacts gateway response times
• Authentication flows behave differently across devices, carriers, and regions

A tiny delay, even one as small as  200–300ms, can produce abandoned carts that never hit your logs.

This is why global device coverage and real-world conditions matter more than ever. Teams need to validate how their payment flows behave on the exact devices, networks, and environments customers actually use, not just in ideal lab setups.

Flexible Payments Took Center Stage

As reported by PYMNTS, economic pressure pushed shoppers to prioritize flexible payments this year:

• 60% of paycheck-to-paycheck consumers used fixed-installment credit plans
• Over 50% of Gen Z leaned on loyalty rewards and points
• BNPL continued to grow, especially for large-ticket purchases

Flexible payments add a layer of complexity to the mix. Retailers have to account for each option’s approval logic, timing rules, and edge cases. Installments rely on issuer decisions that can vary by card type and customer profile. Rewards redemptions interact with pricing, discounts, and loyalty systems in ways that are easy to overlook. BNPL combines merchant checks, provider decisions, and fallback paths that must all line up perfectly to avoid a failed payment.

For QA teams, these are no longer optional or niche flows. They are everyday behaviours. Testing needs to cover approvals, declines, mixed-payment carts, partial refunds, and disputes across real devices and networks. 

The Takeaways for 2026 and Beyond

Cyberweek 2025 made it clear that the modern shopping journey is influenced by forces that traditional QA processes were never designed for. AI is actively shaping what people see, what they choose, and how they pay. 

As more brands roll out their own assistants and more customers rely on chatbots to make decisions for them, the only responsible move is to test these systems the same way customers use them.

Add the complexity of flexible payments and a growing number of mobile shoppers to the mix, and it’s easy to see why checkout flows look so different from one customer to another. If your testing does not reflect the conditions your customers face, you risk missing the issues that matter most.

That level of coverage is hard to build and maintain in-house, especially when you need real devices, real people, and real transactions across multiple locations. That’s where Testlio can help!

We help retailers, marketplaces, and payment providers validate checkout flows the way customers actually experience them. On real devices, in real markets, under real-world pressure. Our global testing community, combined with LeoAI Engine™, allows companies to:

• Simulate AI-driven and unpredictable buyer flows
• Validate payments across thousands of real mobile devices and carrier networks
• Test wallets, BNPL, rewards, and installment logic under real transaction conditions
• Identify latency bottlenecks and region-specific failures before they impact revenue
• Ensure that new payment options behave consistently across OS versions, app builds, and geographies

As AI takes over more of the shopping decision-making pipeline, the brands that win will be the ones whose checkout performance remains stable, accurate, and lightning-fast, no matter how customers arrive there. 

If you’re ready to eliminate uncertainty and build a future-proof payments experience, contact us today to learn how we can help.