Back-to-School Data Shows What Retailers Need to Get Right This Peak Season

Back-to-school spending is on track to hit $146.8 billion in 2026, a survey high, according to the National Retail Federation's 2026 Back-to-School Consumer Trends webinar. That number holds up even with consumer sentiment soft and prices rising, which says something specific about how shoppers are behaving right now: they are spending carefully, but they are still spending. For retailers, the practical question is what to do with that window before it closes.

Consumers are still buying, and watching every dollar while they do itlink to this section

Sixty-one percent of shoppers who have started their back-to-school buying say they are seeing higher prices this year, and their response is to work harder rather than pull back: 46% are comparative shopping more, 41% are turning to discount stores, and 38% are hunting coupons or buying fewer items per trip. Thirty-seven percent say they will cut back in other spending areas to protect this purchase, 20% will use buy now, pay later, and 17% will work extra hours to cover it.

Timing has shifted too. Thirty-two percent of shoppers had started by early June this year, pulled forward by summer deal events from major retailers. But the share who have finished even half their list by early July has barely moved, and NRF's multi-year data shows completion sliding later even as starts move earlier. The season is starting sooner and running longer, which stretches the promotional window retailers have to work with on both ends.

How retailers can get ahead of the surgelink to this section

An earlier, longer season means the retailers who wait for the traditional back-to-school weeks to start promoting are already behind. Pulling forward pricing and deal messaging to match when shoppers are actually starting, in June rather than August, gives a retailer more chances to be the first comparison a price-conscious shopper makes rather than the third.

It also means frontline teams need to be ready earlier and for longer. Contact center and store staff are the ones fielding the extra price and stock questions that come with a shopper checking more places before they buy. Scheduling that assumes one predictable rush week will leave teams short during the actual surge, which now runs from early summer through August. Getting ahead of this season means staffing and training frontline teams to the real shape of the demand, not the shape it used to have.

Staying connected is what keeps a price-conscious shopper from walking awaylink to this section

A shopper willing to wait longer on delivery or stock for a better price has already made that trade-off on purpose. What they haven't agreed to is getting a wrong answer. If a retailer tells them online that an item is in stock and a store associate says otherwise, or a contact center agent quotes a different price than the one they saw online, that's a failure that costs the sale outright, no matter how good the original price was, not a service trade-off the shopper knowingly made.

Avoiding that comes down to context. Everyone answering a shopper's questions needs the full history of that conversation, no matter which channel the shopper used to ask. A contact center agent picking up a call after a customer already messaged in on WhatsApp should see that exchange, not start the conversation over and ask the shopper to repeat themselves. That's what the 8x8 Platform for CX is built to do: bring contact center and customer messaging across voice, web chat, SMS, WhatsApp, RCS, and email onto one data model, so every conversation carries its context with it and the answer a shopper gets stays the same no matter which channel they used to ask.

Back-to-school is its own high-stakes season, not a smaller warm-up for the one that follows it, and it's been easy for retailers to under-resource in the past. Keeping the shoppers who are already working hard to spend with you comes down to whether your teams and channels share context, not whether your prices are the lowest on the block. That's the gap worth closing before the next surge hits.

See how 8x8 supports retailers through peak season and beyond: 8x8 for Retail.