Back to School Shoppers Hit the Web Early

Compete submits:

As a child, I remember the final weeks of summer meant only one thing: the first day of school was near. Students across the country will soon be forced to say goodbye to their carefree days of summer and return to the classroom. While children typically dread this time of the year, parents may be anxious for an entirely different reason: the expenses of back-to-school shopping. In these tough economic times, parents must stretch their dollar to cover the cost of new clothes, shoes, school supplies, and much more. Given the doomsday predictions about this year’s back-to-school spending, I decided to take a look at the online behavior of back-to-school (BTS) shoppers for the month of July, and see how their actions compared to this time last year.

First of all, I tracked some popular back-to-school search terms. I saw significant increases in the number of these searches this year, and many websites saw a jump in traffic based on these searches. I focused on five sites that cater to school shopping needs: Office Depot (ODP'>ODP), Office Max (OMX'>OMX), Staples (SPLS'>SPLS), Target (TGT'>TGT), and Walmart (WMT'>WMT).

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