Summer can’t last forever, and eCommerce retailers need to start gearing up for the back-to-school rush. If you haven’t already, you should prepare your site now, so you’re ready for the second largest shopping event of the year, after the winter holidays. As of right now, two thirds of back-to-school shoppers have already started purchasing items for the school year according to the National Retail Federation and sales during back-to-school season are expected to reach 85.42 billion in 2026.
Below we break down areas where you can optimize your site to ensure that you’re ready for the back-to-school rush.
Marketing
- Expand Marketing Channels: Build a marketing campaign that aligns with your back-to-school strategy across all channels including advertising, social media, email, and your website content. Focus on elements that make the shopping experience more seamless for busy parents. Invest in features that increase convenience like buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) options or buy online pick-up in store (BOPIS).
- Leverage User-Generated Content: You should always be incorporating UGC in your marketing strategy, but it can help you build trust with your customers even more during back-to-school season. You can partner with influencers who understand your audience in ways you couldn’t before, or invest in tools that make it easy to gather and display customer feedback on your site to help parents looking for social proof before they purchase.
- Use Customer Segmentation: Take advantage of historical data and use your customer relationship management tools to sort customers into groups based on their past purchases or other demographic details. This way you can target specific customer segments with highly relevant marketing that’s tailored and personalized. Tools like Klaviyo and Zendesk can help you automate customer segmentation efficiently so you don’t have to waste resources to organize your customer data.
Fulfillment
Evaluate Partners: Now is a great time to look at your internal processes to evaluate what’s working and what’s not. To make sure you have enough stock on hand, and to ensure products will be ready to ship quickly when your customer places their order, you’ll need to ensure you’re working with partners that will support you through the chaos. Third-party providers like DHL or Amazon can help streamline your supply chain.
Analyze Historical Data to Predict Demand: Demand forecasting is an important step in preparing for back-to-school, as you will likely have a significant increase in demand and will require more stock on hand to keep up. Look back on previous years to get an idea of what to expect. You’ll also want to ensure that inventory data remains as accurate as possible to avoid running out of items, it can be helpful to organize items in batches or categories to make packing easier on your team and your inventory management systems.
Automate the Fulfillment Process: There are many tools out there that can help you optimize your fulfillment processes, so you don’t have to use valuable resources to keep things on track. Choose tools that can seamlessly integrate with your eCommerce platform, resources like ShipGenius can help you automate your supply chain, or you can choose an eCommerce platform that can create custom integrations tailored to your unique needs and automate almost any internal processes.
Sales Strategy
- Get Started Early: Regardless of the sales strategies you use to incentivize customers to buy, parents are starting their shopping earlier each year. To get ahead of the competition, many retailers have started prepping for back-to-school in early June. If you haven’t already started preparing your site, start running your promotions sooner than later to get a head start. You can offer special early bird promotions to give parents exclusive discounts for starting their shopping early.
- Offer Discounts and Incentives: Promotions are a great way to get parents excited about your products and increase average order value. There are many options when it comes to promoting your products during back-to-school season. Beyond offering flash sales and discounts, offer bundle deals and special curated collections so customers can shop for all the back-to-school essentials in one place. This makes the shopping experience much more convenient for parents and increases the amount they’re willing to spend at once.
- Utilize Upselling and Cross-Selling Strategies: While offering back-to-school bundles is one great way to incentivize customers to buy more, you can also optimize your site with personalized recommendations for customers based on their shopping behaviors. Upselling and cross-selling strategies are perfect for back-to-school shoppers because most parents have a long list of items they need to buy and prefer the convenience of getting everything in one place.
User Experience
- Optimize Your Checkout Flow: As mentioned before, upselling and cross-selling features can be added to the checkout flow to make sure your customer doesn’t leave anything behind. Additionally, too many steps throughout your checkout flow can add friction and cause customers to abandon their carts and often never return. Keep your checkout experience as concise as possible, offer guest checkout, and add a variety of payment options including buy-now-pay-later to make the checkout experience efficient and painless.
- Improve Speed and Performance: The last thing you want during one of the busiest times of the year is slow loading times or even your site crashing because your servers can’t handle the increase in requests. The standard site load time is under 3 seconds but is ideally under half of a second. If your site is performing slowly and you don’t know why, we offer a site assessment tool to comb your site for anything preventing it from performing as it should be.
- Evaluate Accessibility: If your site isn’t accessible for users with disabilities, you may be losing revenue. Reference the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to learn more about how to optimize your site to ensure anyone can easily use your site, or set up a site assessment where we can check if your site meets accessibility standards. Beyond creating a more inclusive experience for users, an ADA accessible site can increase eCommerce revenue and boost your SEO for better visibility.
Final Thoughts
If you’re wondering if you need to make any adjustments on your site before the chaos of back-to-school begins, you can conduct A/B testing to evaluate how your site is performing and uncover areas of improvement before it’s too late. Further, during times of increased traffic it’s advisable to conduct a code freeze, so that you aren’t currently launching any new tools or projects that could impact the user experience or cause issues in your back end. Finally, if you’re looking for more help setting yourself up for success this back-to-school season, consider switching to an eCommerce platform that’s built to help you grow. Our eCommerce platform marketAgility was purpose-built to enable sustainable eCommerce growth for our clients looking to reach their full potential. Set up a consultation today to learn more.
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