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With just two weeks to go before Labor Day, back to school shoppers are feeling the need to complete this annual ritual. As the media has noted, consumers may still have their hands tightly clamped on their wallets, but anyone who has been in a mall lately can confirm parents and children making the rounds.
Our parent organization, the National Retail Federation, and partner BIGresearch polled consumers between August 1 and 10 to get an update on how Back to School (BTS) shopping was going. Shop.org members can now download the data update for online BTS shoppers. A few highlights in the meantime:
- As of August 10, very few consumers were done with their back-to-school shopping, but online BTS shoppers even less so than other average BTS shoppers. Perhaps online shoppers are used to holding out in the hope of better deals as August wears on?
- It turns out that coupons, sales and/or promotions had already influenced the vast majority of online BTS shoppers who had started their shopping by early August.
- Furthermore, six out of 10 online BTS shoppers noted that coupons influence them to shop at a particular store (vs. closer to four out of 10 among all BTS shoppers). Overall, online BTS shoppers appear to respond well to a mix of both online and traditional advertising. Around half of online BTS shoppers are responding to in-store promotions and the trusty advertising insert. One-third also cited word of mouth, direct mail and TV / broadcast as influencers. Social media (Facebook, Twitter and the like) worked some degree of influence for approximately one in 10 online BTS shoppers at this point.
- Close to two-thirds of online BTS shoppers expected to shop in discount stores, department stores and clothing stores as they completed their BTS shopping later this month. Almost half were also expected to hit office supply stores, compared with just one-third of all BTS shoppers.
As always, I welcome your feedback and thoughts.
