Back to School: Why Amazon Moves to the Head of the Class Over Target, Wal-Mart

We find ourselves mid-year 2015 with the back-to-school shopping season upon us. The National Retail Federation reports that shoppers plan to spend about $630 overall on clothing, shoes, supplies and electronics for their K-12 students this year, a nearly 6 percent decline from the $669 average planned budget in 2014. Since the recession, consumers’ back-to-school budgets have consistently followed an up/down pattern as parents restocked one year (“up”) and reused backpacks, digital devices, etc., the next (“down”), so this year’s decline in planned spending didn’t exactly come as a surprise. Of course, this doesn’t make marketers’ jobs any easier in what’s already proved to be a challenging year for ringing up retail sales. Digging into our back-to-school insights a bit further, though, can help us uncover which retailers may be better positioned to gain this season vs. those who may end up missing out. And for this installment, we’ll focus on the “Big 3” in back-to-school retailing: Wal-Mart, Target and Amazon.com.