Sharpen your pencils and open your notebooks, because class is back in session. More and more parents, teachers, and students will be shopping for their K–12 and college supplies. Is your site ready? Read on to learn how you can prepare your site for this year’s Back to School extravaganza.
Not sure that Back to School matters for your business? If your online store offers products that students and teachers could use during the school year—from the must-haves to the less obvious—it might be worth dedicating time to planning a campaign and getting your site ready. Take a look at some numbers from the National Retail Federation and Deloitte to consider the impact Back to School shopping could have on your ecommerce business.
Back to School by the numbers
- $41.5 billion – total estimated spending on Back to School
- $94 billion – total estimated spending on Back to College
- $890 – average expense per individual for Back to School
- $1,367 – average expense per individual for Back to College
- $11.9 billion – planned online spending for Back to School in 2022
- 35% – share of shoppers who use social media for Back to School shopping.
- 77% – share of shoppers who said they’d switch brands if their preferred brand is out of stock.
Buy with Prime lets you help both the prepared shoppers and the procrastinators check must-have items off their lists, making Buy with Prime your competitive advantage. By offering free 1–2 day shipping, shoppers have more time to browse school supplies before the first bell rings, helping them make sure they have everything they need for a successful start to the school year, while helping you increase conversions.
If Back to School season is important for your ecommerce business, check out these nine tips to get your site ready.
1. Build a collection page
Collection pages group products, typically through a filter, to make it easier for customers to find a specific category or theme. These pages are typically a searchable gallery of products that help shoppers easily find the right product or deal, rather than telling the story behind each product.
When building your Back to School collection page, consider these tips for showcasing featured products:
- Prioritize your best-sellers. Choose from the top 10% of your most-purchased products for your Back to School deals to maximize campaign potential. According to research from the
Baymard Institute
, 23% of users on sites that offer a “Best Sellers” category selected it, often as their first navigational choice from the home page.
- Promote products with 4+ star ratings. Featuring products that have already received high marks from existing customers is another way to put your best foot forward for your campaign. We recommend featuring products with a minimum rating of 4 stars. Learn more
about Reviews from HAQM
.
- Offer exclusive products not sold on other channels. An “only available here” approach offers your shoppers something special while making your Back to School campaign more distinct on your site.
- Debut a new product or limited release. Spotlighting a new product during Back to School season can help make your campaign more exciting and newsworthy.
2. Promote messaging on your home page
Make it easy for shoppers to find your Back to School deals by adding a link to your collection page from your home page. Depending on your site’s structure, you can link through a hero image, a top-level navigation menu, or a notification banner. Site optimization specialists at the Baymard Institute note that offering one-click access to a prefiltered list or collection page from your home page can streamline discovery and save shoppers time.
3. Boost product credibility with the right description
According to Baymard research , 10% of sites have product descriptions that are insufficient for shoppers, causing merchants to lose the sale. By offering more of the right information and tools for comparison on your website, shoppers can spend less time searching for more information and feel more confident in making a purchase. Based on Baymard’s large-scale usability research, there are three areas of your product description that need to be included to keep shoppers engaged: materials or ingredients, product dimensions, and compatibility information.
Also consider adding videos or photos by customers to show “real world” feedback on the value of the product. If available, you could also include embedded influencer or expert product reviews to give your products added credibility.
4. Improve shopper confidence with reviews
If you don’t have videos or photos from customers, reviews are the next best thing. In fact, nearly half of shoppers say they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
According to the latest UX best practices from the Baymard Institute , businesses should feature a ratings distribution chart within their reviews section by default. This is important because the spread and distribution of ratings can drastically impact a shopper’s interpretation of the reviews. For example, shoppers sometimes speculated that the reviews were fake if they only saw overwhelmingly positive reviews when scrolling through the first page of reviews. Second, when primarily negative reviews were listed first, users often perceive the product as being overall poorly rated, when the opposite was in fact the case. In both of these cases, reviews actually create an unnecessarily negative impression of the site or the product. By allowing shoppers to visually assess the distribution of the overall review ratings, it can provide the necessary perspective to ease both the issues of distrust and misinterpreting a product’s actual rating.
If your business offers Buy with Prime and sells products on HAQM, you can improve product credibility during your Back to School campaign by displaying consumer-trusted reviews from HAQM.com on your products that offer Buy with Prime. Learn more about Reviews from HAQM for Buy with Prime .
5. Make returns clear
By making it clear to your customers that you offer free returns on eligible items through Buy with Prime, you can give shoppers confidence in making their purchase. When you offer Buy with Prime, return eligibility is noted with a “FREE Delivery & Returns” message next to the Buy with Prime button. If an item isn’t eligible for returns, it says “FREE delivery.”
6. Hone your product pages
There are plenty of ways to get an A+ on your product pages, including optimizing the Buy with Prime checkout and using the right product visuals, messaging, and supporting content. To help you hone your product pages for Back to School, focus on key opportunities, where small changes can have a big impact on your campaign results.
- Spotlight delivery estimates. By displaying the Prime logo and fast, transparent delivery times, you can help reduce the risk of checkout abandonment—
22% of shoppers indicated that they’d abandon checkout
if shipping was too slow and
62% of shoppers expect their orders to arrive in fewer than three business days
when choosing free shipping.
- Choose your button style and placement. Test which style of the Buy with Prime button performs better on your site and where to place it for the easiest path to checkout. For instance, merchants that use the stand-alone button instead of the full button component and place it beneath “Add to cart” are experiencing higher shopper conversion on average.
- Customize the button. You can customize the Buy with Prime button to match your brand style and make it feel more like an integrated part of your shopping experience. Depending on how you integrate Buy with Prime on your site, customizations might include: button size, button corner radius, delivery date font face, delivery date font size, delivery date font color, and using a transparent background or matching your site background color. Learn about four more button enhancements and customizations that you can make using the Buy with Prime Shopper Experience Guidelines .
7. Prepare your promotions
Back to School shoppers are looking for everything from glue sticks to laptops, so what deals you offer and how you promote them should be the most thoughtful part of your Back to School strategy. Consider offering exclusive, time-based deals to help drive urgency and interest. Use these tips to help you create deals on your site:
- Keep it exclusive. Exclusive discounts for Prime members can stand out in search and product pages. Buy with Prime verifies that a shopper is a Prime member at checkout, so you can make deals exclusive to Prime members by only offering them through Buy with Prime.
- Offer a 20% discount or more. Deep discounts can be a great way to attract new customers, but make sure you get the word out about the special deal. Create social media promotions that emphasize the limited-time discount or offer loyal customers a special discount to drive them back to your site.
- Run Buy with Prime promotions. The Buy with Prime promotion feature offers an easy way to offer exclusive discounts and promotions to Prime members to incentivize them to purchase from your site. You can create product- or order-based coupon codes as part of a marketing campaign to help drive new and existing customers to the Buy with Prime products on your site. Or, use time-bound coupon codes to inspire shoppers to act fast, helping to drive conversions. For additional inspiration, check out
6 tips for running promotions
.
8. Optimize for the shopper experience
Prep your site for the school rush by focusing on elements that improve the shopper experience. Consider clear messaging about Buy with Prime and how to apply discounts, plus a simple navigation and mobile responsiveness to help make browsing your products easier.
9. Leverage tracking and nurture tools
Before pushing your campaign live, set up tracking tools so that you can report on your campaign’s performance and shopper conversion after Back to School shopping season is over. For example, you can set up advertising pixels to attribute Buy with Prime orders to specific social media and search engine ad campaigns, helping you evaluate and maximize your ad spend. Learn more about conversion tracking with Buy with Prime .
With this data and Buy with Prime analytics in the merchant console, you can evaluate performance of campaigns and identify purchasing trends. You can create customer segments and personalized outreach to get strategic with your nurture campaigns.
For Back to School shoppers who start but don’t complete checkout using Buy with Prime, you can also set up an abandoned checkout email campaign through a marketing automation solution, like the Klaviyo for Buy with Prime app . It sends automated email reminders to shoppers who started but didn’t complete their checkout using Buy with Prime.
Email marketing automation can also help you nurture Prime member audience segments after the school shopping season by creating personalized nurture emails based on Back to School sales you ran. For example, you could promote complementary products to those that you featured during your Back to School campaign or products that are popular follow-up purchases to your top-selling products.
With the Back to School season in full swing, remember to focus on elements outside of your site too, including marketing and customer service. If you haven’t added Buy with Prime to your site yet and want to offer Back to School shoppers the fast, free delivery that they love from Prime, you can sign up today.