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The hot take
- Amazon’s share of back-to-school sales across our twelve largest channels fell from 52% to 43%. Zalando, Walmart, TikTok Shop, Best Buy, and ABOUT YOU all gained share year over year.
- Eleven of our largest back-to-school brands grew sales 18%. Their listings grew nearly twice as fast as their product count.
- Returns fell from 11% to 10% across the network. All eleven of those brands improved on last year.
- Clothing and footwear grew 11% and carried close to three-quarters of the season. Musical instruments grew 29%.
Amazon still takes the biggest slice of back-to-school by far. It’s just a smaller slice than last year. Between June 1 and August 31, brands and retailers in the Rithum network sent more of their back-to-school assortment through Zalando, Walmart, TikTok Shop, Best Buy, and ABOUT YOU than they did a year ago, and Amazon’s share of our twelve largest channels went from 52% to 43%.
Rithum processes sales for brands and retailers across Amazon and 900+ other channels in North America and Europe, so we can see where the season went. This is the second post in our peak season series, after June’s Prime Day results, and Prime Big Deal Days begins October 6.
Which channels gained back-to-school share in 2026?
Globally, Zalando, Walmart, TikTok Shop, Best Buy, and ABOUT YOU each took a larger share of back-to-school sales than they did last summer. Best Buy more than tripled its share from a small base. TikTok Shop more than doubled.
Amazon ran Prime Day from June 23 to 26, in the middle of the back-to-school season. Back-to-school sales grew across the network, and Amazon’s share of them shrank because brands sold more through other channels.
With Amazon’s share declining as the channel saturates, brands are looking for more room to sell and advertise, which brings them to one of many next large channels: TikTok.
Externally in the market, advertisers increased their TikTok spend 20% to 40% over the summer in preparation for back to school, and the number of advertisers using the channel during that period rose 160%, confirming that TikTok continues to be a rising channel for brands and consumers alike.
What were the top selling back-to-school categories in 2026?
If you sell apparel, back-to-school is your season. Clothing and footwear grew 11% and made up close to three-quarters of everything that moved through our network this summer.
Computers and tablets slid, and the products inside that category barely resemble last year’s. Printers and business laptops dropped out of our top-selling products. Gaming laptops and tablets took over.
Then there’s Pokémon, which held four of the eight top-selling slots in our network. The sports cards and fan shop category sitting right next to it finished flat, with no sports card in the top 20 at all. If you bought to the category, you missed it. Target has reported trading card sales up nearly 70%, driven largely by Pokémon, and Walmart’s marketplace a 200% jump, with both chains capping purchases to curb scalping, so that supply pressure reaches well past our network.
How did brands and retailer clients on Rithum perform?
As a reminder, selling on a variety of retailer channels whether 1P or 3P can be highly complex, as every retailer channel wants product data in its own format. A product that sells well on Amazon sells nothing on Zalando until someone builds the listing to Zalando’s requirements. Zalando, Walmart, TikTok Shop, and Best Buy all grew their share of back-to-school sales this summer. You can’t capture any of it until your listings meet each channel’s requirements.
Eleven of our biggest back-to-school brands ranked in the top sellers both summers. Their combined sales grew 18%.
Here’s how that broke down:
- Units sold: up 15%
- Listings producing sales: up 11%
- Distinct products sold: up 6%
While product assortment grew just 6% and average price per unit barely moved, our clients increased listings per product sold from 1.38 to 1.45, and every selling listing brought in about 6% more than last summer.
For Rithum clients, TikTok Shop held a bigger share of our back-to-school listings than it returned in sales last summer. This summer the two evened out, and Walmart narrowed the same kind of gap. If you passed on either channel last year because the listing work outran the return, that math has changed.
Why did returns fall for Rithum clients this back-to-school season?
Returns came in at 10% across the network, down from 11%, and all eleven of those brands improved on last summer.
Our global returns and profit impact report found that 61% of shoppers return items over poor fit, and a third say the product didn’t match the description or photos. Those are listing problems, not logistics problems. The same report puts U.S. online returns above $363 billion on a 24.5% return rate.
Channel differences are where those mismatches start. One marketplace carries a compatibility field and the next one drops it. A title format cuts the qualifier that mattered. Our 2026 commerce readiness index found 91% of retailers and 78% of brands reporting poor data quality, and nearly three-quarters saying inaccurate data drives bad decisions.
When is Amazon’s October Prime event in 2026?
Prime Big Deal Days runs October 6 and 7. Amazon confirmed the dates on September 15: 48 hours starting at 12:01 a.m. PDT, deals across more than 35 categories, and new drops three times a day. It runs for Prime members in 22 countries, including the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Sweden, and Ireland, so this is not a U.S.-only date.
Amazon won’t have October to itself. Walmart’s own event starts October 5, a day ahead of Prime Big Deal Days. The channels that gained back-to-school share this summer are the same ones competing for attention in two weeks.
The deal calendar closed before the events open. Amazon’s Seller Central holiday notice set the Prime Big Deal Days submission window at July 8 to September 8. Black Friday Week and Cyber Monday submissions run through October 20.
Bain expects U.S. holiday sales to top $1 trillion for the first time, with online up 9% against 2.5% in stores, and Deloitte puts holiday e-commerce growth at 7.5% to 8.4%. As we said after Prime Day, add channels while there’s still time to get the listings right.
How do AI shopping agents change what brands need to do?
We wrote in June that 95% of shoppers who get a product recommendation from an LLM won’t visit a brand or retailer site to verify it, and that among 18 to 27 year olds, 64% buy on the recommendation alone.
The infrastructure behind those recommendations is still settling. OpenAI switched on checkout inside ChatGPT last September, relaunched it in February with a million Shopify brands lined up, and pulled it in March, moving purchases into retailer apps instead. Forrester counted roughly 30 of those brands actually live. Walmart, which had made about 200,000 products available in ChatGPT, reported that in-chat checkout converted three times worse than routing shoppers back to walmart.com. Google and Shopify launched a rival standard in January, and Shopify dropped its approval requirement in June.
Amazon built its own, and it’s in front of shoppers during this event. Alexa for Shopping sets deal alerts by category, checks 365 days of price history, and will buy an item automatically when it hits a shopper’s target price. It also tracks new releases across Amazon and the wider web.
Most recently Amazon announced their partnership with ChatGPT advertising, currently in beta with select U.S. advertisers buying ChatGPT inventory through Amazon DSP. This is a big step in LLM traffic and Amazon activity coming together and a welcome change in the agentic market, especially for advertisers who have been starting to split their strategies to accommodate both buying platforms.
Where does Rithum fit?
The brands that grew this back-to-school season sold in more places and kept their product data accurate enough to hold up under volume. Marketplace Listings keeps that data consistent across 900+ channels. Product Feeds delivers it in the format each channel and each AI assistant expects, including ChatGPT and Perplexity. Inventory Management protects the listing during the hours demand spikes.
Add channels now, while there is still time to get the listings right before October. If back-to-school showed demand somewhere you do not sell yet, start there.
Talk to our team
About this data
Rithum network figures, June 1 to August 31, 2026 versus the same dates in 2025, across more than 900 channels in North America and Europe. Channel shares are calculated across our twelve largest channels by sales.
