As October approaches, many retailers are entering the most strategic period of the year. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas…Q4 accounts for a major portion of revenue and often determines overall annual performance. For the 2025 peak season, more generative AI solutions than ever before have been mobilised to capture and convert online traffic during a period when volumes multiply.
For retailers, the importance of the peak season varies. While at Kingfisher, the fourth quarter accounts for only 22% of total activity (2024 data), this figure rises to 40% at Blissim and 48% at La Grande Récré (2024 turnover: €230 million including VAT, up by 13% on a like-for-like basis). For the toy retailer, the average basket size during this period increases from €33 to €38. Last year, sales grew by 6% in the fourth quarter and the target is to achieve the same this year. Overall for the year, 91% of business comes from stores and 9% from digital. “My current priority for the website is to use it as a showcase to drive traffic to stores”, Elisa Ouvrard, Omnichannel Marketing Director, told mind Retail. That’s where I’m focusing the bulk of investments”. For the retailer, the share of digital revenue doubled in a year, driven by an expanded range of 8,000 products and the unification of digital activities with those of Joué Club, now a parent company, in a common warehouse.
At Blissim, the goal is to increase sales by 15% in the fourth quarter, after a 12% increase last year. The department store chain Galeries Lafayette, which carried out redesign of an e-commerce site in April 2024 (switched to SAP Commerce), has not given any quantified targets. “Traffic to our e-commerce site increases tenfold on Black Friday compared to a normal day [in August 2025, it recorded 5 million monthly visits according to Similarweb, editor’s note], said Régis Pennel, E-commerce Director. “To meet our growth targets, we anticipated purchases in advance in order to secure the necessary volumes for this period, which is the most important of the year. It is also necessary to adapt logistics to be able to respond to this volume uplift and to keep up with parcel shipments. To do this, we are relying in particular on stores with “ship from store” services, which represent 15% of our total turnover“. For the 2025 fiscal year, Galeries Lafayette is targeting a 20%-growth for online sales, after a steady trend in 2024.
For the Swedish pure player Boozt (2024 turnover: €750 million, up 6%), which positions as an online department store with beauty, sports, children’s, home and fashion categories, the fourth quarter accounted for 38% of total sales in 2024. The peak season, in particular, resulted in double-digit traffic growth.
Journaliste économique pour mind Retail depuis 2024, j’analyse la transformation digitale du commerce.
