Australia’s expanding Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales season is making it harder for the Reserve Bank to read the real state of the economy, with a late-2025 online shopping surge distorting both spending and inflation data.

New figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show consumer spending in November jumped 6.3% from a year earlier, well above the 5.5% economists expected and the strongest two-month run in two years.

Much of the lift was driven by big promotions from global e-commerce platforms such as Amazon, Shein and Temu, which now run discount campaigns for weeks rather than days.

The burst of spending lands just weeks before the RBA’s February 2 meeting, where markets are pricing in roughly a one-in-three chance of the first rate rise in more than two years.

Yet the data is sending mixed signals. Despite the spending spike, headline inflation was flat between October and November as heavy discounting pushed down prices for clothing, footwear and furniture.

For the RBA, the key question is whether the pre-Christmas splurge represents genuine strength or simply spending pulled forward.

The ABS has updated its seasonal adjustment methods to account for the changing retail calendar, but policymakers are likely to put more weight on the quarterly inflation data due on January 28.