First indicators showed that retailers experienced a positive Christmas season.[1] In this blog, we want to have a closer look at expenditures during the Christmas season and quantify the difference in spending compared to previous years.
For this purpose, we use card expenditure data provided by Worldline Schweiz AG. In particular, we use the real Consumer Spending Index (CSI) Switzerland for Retail: Other goods. These data cover both point-of-sale and e-commerce consumer spending in Switzerland as measured by Worldine’s payment terminals. The data are corrected for shifts from cash to card payments as well as for changes in the number and composition of the data provider’s client pool during the recent years. This allows for a consistent analysis over multiple years.
We define the Black Friday period between November 20th and December 3rd as the start of the Christmas season. These two weeks include Black Friday and its preceding days in all years considered. This is then followed by the three-week pre-Christmas period between December 4th and December 24th. The post-Christmas period is the week from December 27th until January 2nd. This classification ensures that all periods (except for the Christmas days) include the same weekdays in all years.
Figure 1: Contribution to year-on-year changes of expenditures in the category Retail: Other goods, corrected for inflation and shifts to card payments.
Notes: The figure shows the contribution of the different subperiods in the Christmas season to the year-on-year changes in real expenditures. For example, out of the 9.6% growth of expenditures in 2019, approximately 4 percentage points are due to the Black Friday period. The blue frame (Total) illustrates the growth rate in expenditures during the full Christmas season.
Figure 1 shows that a strong increase of expenditures during the Christmas season in 2019 and 2020 was followed by declines between 2021 and 2024. These developments were mainly driven by spending in the pre-Christmas period and, to a smaller extent, by the Black Friday period. In 2025, expenditures during the Christmas season increased by around one percent compared to 2024 because spending in the Black Friday period was a bit higher compared to the previous year.
Figure 2: Contribution to year-on-year changes of expenditures in the category Retail: Other goods, corrected for inflation and shifts to card payments, by payment channel.
Notes: The figure shows the contribution of the different periods to the year-on-year changes in real expenditures, split between payments at the point-of-sale and e-commerce payments.
Figure 2 takes a closer look at the growth rates of expenditures during the Christmas season presented in Figure 1. It splits the expenditures between payments at the point-of-sale and payments via e-commerce. The figure shows that expenditures at the point-of-sale decreased over time but that this negative trend almost stopped in 2025. In e-commerce instead, expenditures skyrocketed in 2020 and remained quite stable thereafter. In 2025, there was another increase of 7% that more than offsets the slight decrease in point-of-sale expenditures and drives the higher total growth rate visible in Figure 1.
Overall, our findings indicate that spending during the Christmas season has recovered somewhat in 2025 after falling in the previous years. This was mainly driven by spending via e-commerce during the Black Friday period and the subsequent shopping period before Christmas. The level of expenditures during the whole Christmas season, however, remains around 15 percent lower in 2025 relative to the peak of spending during the Christmas season reached in 2020.
The reasons for these developments could be diverse. Consumer confidence is likely to be an important driver, but also the distribution of weekdays around Christmas or the time which Swiss residents spend abroad during the Christmas season could have important implications for the total spending of consumers during the Christmas season in Switzerland. Shifts in the spending of Swiss residents abroad as well as in the spending by foreign residents in Switzerland have affected the spending in the Christmas season particularly in 2020 and 2021 during the Corona pandemic.