The back-to-school season is here, and a growing number of early summer sales from the likes of Amazon, Walmart, and Target are changing when and how shoppers purchase their fall essentials.

“I think that Prime Day and the associated sales and discounts from other retailers around Prime Day are being used as a kickoff for back to school,” Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail, told Retail Brew.

This is pulling back-to-school spending forward, he said, as parents take advantage of bargains offered at mid-July sales events such as Target Circle Week and Walmart Deals, which have emerged as brick-and-mortar retailers’ answer to Prime Day.

Keep reading here.—AV

Retailers, marketers, and pretty much everybody in between know all too well about the Black Friday + Cyber Monday deluge. If you wanna come out on top, you need to stand out.

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When Walmart announced recently that it would install digital shelf price labels in about half of its stores by 2026, it looked to some like a harbinger that the retailer would implement dynamic pricing, the term for raising and lowering prices in real time. Walmart has insisted the new technology won’t be used for dynamic pricing, but Vusion Group, which makes the software Walmart is using, touts its ability to “dynamically update prices based on real-time data.”

Wendy’s will test dynamic pricing as early as 2025, insisting to the New York Times that it has no plans to raise prices when restaurants are busy but rather only lower prices when they’re slow.

Dynamic pricing is already common in Europe, not to mention surge pricing on rideshare apps, so it may gain more of a foothold in the US, too. But if retailers are weighing whether to adopt dynamic pricing, they’ll want to grapple with resistance to the idea on these shores.

Slightly more than one in five (22%) US consumers wouldn’t spend money at a business that used dynamic pricing, according to a new NerdWallet survey conducted with The Harris Poll in April.

Keep reading here.—AAN

On Wednesdays, we wear pink spotlight Retail Brew’s readers. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click here to introduce yourself.

Sue Azari, whose retail résumé includes roles at Mercari and Yoox Net-a-Porter Group, is an e-commerce industry consultant at AppsFlyer.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in retail? I speak with retail companies and advise them on ways that they can grow users on their apps.

One thing we can’t guess about your job from your LinkedIn profile? That my job can get quite nerdy at times. I have to keep up with and explain changes in the mobile ecosystem including changes in privacy regulations.

What’s your favorite project you’ve worked on? Being part of a team at AppsFlyer that pushed forward a project to develop a data collaboration platform to support retail media networks.

Which emerging retail trend are you most excited about right now, and why? I’m most excited about the growing trend of retail media networks. Commerce media is a widely growing marketing channel that is primed to reach $140 billion in 2024 and gain more than 20% of the global ad share.

Keep reading here.—EC

The big week is coming. During BFCM last year, Attentive drove over $1.8 billion for customers via personalized SMS and email. Do you have strategies to reach similar numbers? No worries, if not—Attentive’s got 36 stellar BFCM campaigns that’ll show you how to crush it. Get movin’.