News

Walmart taps mobile app to drive deeper online back-to-school sales

The upcoming weekend is viewed as the kick-off for annual school shopping, so the retailer is rolling up on rollbacks.

August 6, 2015

The nation’s top retailer, Wal-Mart, is piling on the rollbacks in sales as it gets ready for what it claims to be the kick-off to back-to-school sales.

It’s adding 30 percent more specials to the product mix this year and doing it with a twist: the additional sale items are being pushed to shoppers through its mobile app and at its online Back to Class Cyber Days website pages.

Walmart claims the four days from July 31 to Aug. 3 has shown big traffic boosts in the past two years, doubling in fact, according to a Walmart release.

"When the calendar changes from July to August, it’s like a switch flips in parents’ minds," said Steve Breen, senior VP of merchandising for Walmart.com, in the release. “We can literally start to see it happen with a traffic spike on July 31, and this year we’re timing thousands of the season’s biggest rollbacks to when we know our customers are coming to our site to check-off their back-to-school shopping lists."

Walmart described its additional back-to-school product pricing as “aggressive” and said if supply runs out on any of its top 10 additional items, it will add a rollback on a similar item.