Even though the school year has barely ended, retailers are already gearing up for the second most popular shopping season of the year. Back-to-school sales are expected to total $858.8 billion this year, up 2.6% year over year.

The projected growth rate is better than last year’s 1.6% growth, but trails the prior three years by a significant margin. Year-over-year sales growth totaled 4.5% in 2012, 5.8% in 2013 and 3.6% in 2014. As a percentage of total third-quarter retail sales, back-to-school represents right around 68% consistently over the past four years and is expected to reach the same percentage this year. Back-to-school sales have accounted for about 17% of annual retail sales in each of the past four years and are expected to reach the same level in 2016.

The data were released earlier this week by retail research firm eMarketer.

Monica Peart, forecasting director for eMarketer, offered a reason for the tepid growth figures:

We are seeing back-to-school sales increasingly slipping into other parts of the year, as consumers become trained to wait for promotions. Some people are even waiting until the school year has begun to do their back-to-school shopping.

Online sales are forecast to rise by 15.3% year over year in 2016 and to account for $65.42 billion (7.9%) of the back-to-school sales total. The e-commerce portion of total sales is the highest since eMarketer began tracking that category. eMarketer retail analyst Yory Wurmser said:

Ecommerce is in the midst of a remarkable run of growth. The pace of commerce moving online is actually increasing, and that should be apparent this back-to-school season even for some sectors of retail that traditionally have remained primarily offline, such as home goods and school supplies.

According to eMarketer, the back-to-school shopping season runs through the months of July and August.

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