Holiday shoppers are stretching their budgets by bargain hunting, and by using buy-now-pay-later services, early data from Black Friday retailers shows.

As of Monday, U.S. holiday shoppers had spent $7.3 billion using buy-now-pay-later services like Affirm (AFRM), Klarna and Afterpay, according to data from Adobe. The data firm estimated in October that people will ramp up their use of BNPL this holiday season, spending $17 billion online alone, a 17% increase from last year.

Shoppers may also be making the most out of their budgets by focusing on lower-priced items, if trends at leisure retailers like Dick’s Sporting Goods (DKS) and Academy Sports and Outdoors are any indication.

”Consumers seemed to be shopping lower-ticket discounted apparel and value offerings vs. higher-ticket items” at those stores, Robert F. Ohmes, a research analyst at Bank of America Securities, and other analysts wrote in a report after visiting stores on Black Friday.

The data now coming in from the Black Friday shopping weekend will help answer 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩网:whether—and how—U.S. shoppers are 澳洲幸运5官方开奖结果体彩𓂃网:keeping u꧟p the consumer spending spree that’s kept economic growth chugging along even in the face of sky-high interest rates on consumer loans including credit cards. Buy-now-pay-later services, which allow people to pay for purchases in interest-free installments, could be an increasingly important part of that equation.

Shoppers who used a BNPL service spent $598 on average on Black Friday, versus $452 among those who didn’t use a deferred payment method, accordi🐓ng to a survey of 2,691 U.S. consumers by PYMNTS Intelligence, a data analytics company. 

“This difference suggests that some budget-conscious consumers use these tools to manage cash flow without sacrificing the amount they spend,” Scott Murray, head of analytics at PYMNTS, together with other writers, wrote in an analysis Monday.