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Online Shopping Trends

Back To School: Capitalizing On Student Demographic

August 23rd, 2018 | 2 min. read

Back To School: Capitalizing On Student Demographic Blog Feature

Zmags Blog Author

Sharing perspectives on the latest trends and tips to help eCommerce brands stay ahead to engage and drive revenue.

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With school right around the corner, back-to-school shopping is projected to produce sales of $25.5 billion. While you may think it’s important to capitalize on students, it is equally as important to focus on the parents as well. Like Deloitte says, “retailers will likely need to understand what’s most important to parents when shopping—and where students have the most input.” Here are some quick stats on how to capitalize on the student demographic as well as their parents.  
  • Higher-income households are preparing to spend across all categories including computers and hardware.
 
  • It is averaged that higher-income household will spend $783 compared to $555 low-income households will spend.
 
  • 82 percent of parents will collaborate with their kids for this season’s purchases.
     
  • Back-to-school shopping season occurs from July 12 to September 8th, with heavy online shopping starting closer to the start of school.
 
  • A 2018 RetailMeNot study states “the majority of retailers (89%) believe there is more competition for the attention of back-to-school shoppers than ever before.”

 So how do you grab the attention of students? Last year,  a survey by Rubicon Project found “that mobile would be used heavily amongst parents, with 60% of parents planning to use mobile devices for their start-of-year shopping and 30% planning to do at least a quarter of their Back-to-School shopping on mobile.” And, 72% of retailers are increasing their social marketing to attract younger generations. Gen Y’s have an annual purchasing power of $ 170 billion while Gen Z’s have an annual purchasing power of  $44 billion. With the growing attraction of Instagram and Facebook Live, students will be turning to social platforms to find all their back-to-school shopping needs.  Deals and discounts are also important to shoppers. 93% would make a repeat purchase with a retailer that offered good deals. While 75% of retailers are changing their overall marketing strategy in 2018. 

Sitewide discounts are rated the “best” according to RetailMeNot. Using companies like Launchpad and Shopify Scripts lets you reconfigure sitewide pricing displays and automate discounts rather than pushing customers to manually input them at checkout. While you may think it is too late to tackle the back-to-school market, it is in your business’ best interest to spend time optimizing this market and not simply managing your online store.