Back-to-School Is the Ultimate Stress Test for Holiday Promotions

If retailers want a preview of what’s coming in Q4, they should pay close attention to how consumers are shopping this back-to-school season. The latest data reveals a shopper who is hunting harder for value, embracing new digital tools and shifting how and where purchases happen:

• Household budgets are up by 11.7% in 2026, with spending reaching about $489 per child for supplies, clothing and accessories, according to JLL.
• 61% of kids have access to digital carts to make their own purchases, and physical store shopping is expected to decline from 79% to 70% in 2026, per PwC.
• With inflation lingering, parents are in savings mode: nearly a third (31%) now qualify as “hyper-value seekers,” deploying four or more money-saving tactics such as brand-switching and using cash-back sites, says Deloitte.

For brands and retailers, the numbers may change year to year, but the challenge doesn’t: How can retailers efficiently manage promotions for BTS products while keeping value-conscious shoppers engaged?

More importantly, BTS is a real-world stress test for Q4. When the holiday season kicks offers into overdrive with high-volume, deadline-driven, omnichannel promotions, retailers need to know their promotions infrastructure can keep up.

So, what should retailers be watching—and learning—during BTS before Q4 arrives?

1. Watch How Shoppers Use AI Search and Social Shopping

Deloitte’s BTS survey found consumers are tapping into digital tools more than ever to help with school shopping and deal-hunting. More interestingly, the more digitally engaged the shopper is, the more they spend:

• Shoppers using no digital tools to find deals plan to spend about $381 per child.
• Shoppers using a combination of search, social media and generative AI plan to spend $737 per child — nearly double.

These numbers illustrate the opportunity for retailers to reach consumers with relevant digital offers across an expanding number of discovery channels. But blasting a hundred different digital opportunities won’t, on its own, translate to more sales. Retailers need to be deliberate about which digital offers work for which shoppers and where those offers are most effective.

The advice? Watch how consumers discover, evaluate and engage with offers during BTS. Then use those insights to sharpen incentives for AI-search and social-shopping audiences heading into the holidays.

2. Study the Differences Between High-End and Low-End Items

It may not seem obvious, but there’s a strong overlap in the types of products that sell during BTS and during the holidays. High-end technology and trendy apparel dominate the top of the basket, while low-cost items like pencils and notebooks power the bottom — much like stocking stuffers during the holidays.

Retailers can study promotion performance on these high-end and low-end BTS goods to shape holiday incentives.

In apparel, if a mobile-app-only offer to buy one pair of sneakers and get a second pair half off works well during BTS, retailers can use that insight to inform similar holiday incentives—and deliver them through the channels that already proved effective.

The same logic can be applied to low-end items. Uncover what incentives move BTS snacks, crayons and notebooks, since art supplies and candy reappear during the holidays. Those smaller-ticket purchases can provide valuable clues about offer structure, thresholds and shopper response before holiday volume hits.

3. Troubleshoot Multi-Channel, Multi-Banner Promotions

Retailers that operate several banners and need to manage both store-specific and enterprise-wide offers can use BTS as a live test of their promotions infrastructure.

Getting a unified incentives engine in place to manage multi-banner offers now can help retailers identify execution gaps before Q4 volume hits.

Retailers increasingly have platform-funded, seller-funded and hybrid promotions colliding in the same basket, and it’s a genuinely underreported infrastructure problem as marketplace models spread.

When Michaels added a curated third-party marketplace to its site, for instance, its online assortment grew from roughly 200,000 SKUs to more than 1.3 million, according to comments from the company’s marketing leadership reported by eMarketer.

That kind of growth means more sellers, more pricing rules and more chances for a promotion to apply somewhere it shouldn’t — or fail to apply where it should.

The learning? BTS is the time to stress-test incentives at scale. It’s a chance to uncover conflicting rules, inconsistent offers and execution gaps before the higher-volume holiday season puts even more pressure on the system.

BTS Is a Preview, Not a One-Off

The BTS season isn’t just a seasonal bump on the calendar; it’s a preview of how a retailer’s promotions infrastructure will hold up when volume, channels and urgency all spike at once.

The retailers that treat BTS as a diagnostic, not just a sales event, can walk into Q4 already knowing which offers convert, which channels their shoppers actually use and where their systems are most likely to break under pressure.

The common thread across all three lessons is visibility: seeing how digital and in-store behavior shift, seeing which price points respond to which incentives, and seeing every promotion across every banner in one place before the holiday rush multiplies the risk of getting it wrong.

Retailers can improve visibility now and turn BTS insights into stronger holiday execution—entering Q4 with confidence instead of guesswork.The back-to-school (BTS) numbers are pouring in:

• Household budgets are up by 11.7% in 2026, with spending reaching about $489 per child for supplies, clothing and accessories, according to JLL.
• 61% of kids have access to digital carts to make their own purchases, and physical store shopping is expected to decline from 79% to 70% in 2026, per PwC.
• With inflation lingering, parents are in savings mode: nearly a third (31%) now qualify as “hyper-value seekers,” deploying four or more money-saving tactics such as brand-switching and using cash-back sites, says Deloitte.

For brands and retailers, the numbers may change year to year, but the challenge doesn’t: How can retailers efficiently manage promotions for BTS products while keeping value-conscious shoppers engaged?

More importantly, BTS is a real-world stress test for Q4. When the holiday season kicks offers into overdrive with high-volume, deadline-driven, omnichannel promotions, retailers need to know their promotions infrastructure can keep up.

So, what should retailers be watching—and learning—during BTS before Q4 arrives?