Blake Wright, Sales Director, Brand and Agency at Shopfully, examines how Halloween shopping highlights an opportunity for specialist and discount retailers to influence where consumers shop before they make a purchase.
I grew up in a household that classified Halloween as ‘too American’ so, my first interactions with it were University Halloween parties in underground Gold Coast nightclubs, not the cute dress ups and door knocking from the movies or what I see in suburban streets in Sydney these days.
So, the fact that Australians will spend a record AU$500 million on Halloween this year was a real lesson and clearly something I missed. That figure is up 11% on last year, and it works out at AU$103 for every person taking part.
The spend is not the interesting part. The interesting part is that almost nobody knows where to buy any of it.
A weekly grocery shop is a habit. Same store, same day, roughly the same basket. A Halloween basket is not. It is a costume, face paint, two hundred lollies, a pumpkin and something to put on the front door, and most households have no established answer for where that comes from.
The shopper has to make a decision they do not usually have to make and they make it at home, before they go anywhere.
That decision is which shop. Not which brand.
And they are making it early. On Shopfully’s Marketplace, searches for ‘Halloween’ are up 58% on the same period last year, and they started in September, at least a month before Saturday 31 October. Shoppers are planning well ahead. What they are still working out is where to go.
The products driving engagement on Shopfully this year show why that question is open. Kids’ costumes, games, hair accessories, pyjamas, pet costumes and confectionery are all trending. That is a basket that crosses party shops, discount variety, department stores and supermarkets, with no single store type owning it.
Shopfully research across Australian shoppers found 67% deliberately split their purchases between retailers to chase better value. Sixty-three% always or often research online before they buy, and a third use deal platforms and apps to do it. At the same time, 68% now say they prefer to buy in a physical store, up from 41%, rising to 87% for food and drink.
Put those together and you get the shape of how Australians actually shop in 2026. The research is digital. The purchase is physical. And the thing being decided in between is which door they walk through.
Most brand planning assumes that decision has already been made. Share of shelf, pack presence, a promotional price, a brand campaign aimed at preference. All of it is built for a shopper who is already in the store. On an occasion basket, they are not. They are on the couch on a Tuesday night working out whether this is a Kmart job, a supermarket job or a trip to the party shop on the way home.
And retailer loyalty is at least as soft as brand loyalty. Most Australians (91%) say they have switched brands for a better offer, while 79% say they have gone to a different retailer to get one. The store decision is just as winnable, it is worth considerably more than a single line item, and it gets made first.
This is the opening for specialist and discount retailers, owning these special days and occasions.
The major supermarkets own the habitual trip, and they are tightening their grip on it. Specialist retailers can never compete here, nor do they need to. They need to win the unplanned trip.
Discount variety is a AU$2.3 billion category that has gone nowhere in the face of the changing and hardening Australian economy. Revenue slipped at an annualised 0.5% across the five years to 2025–26.
It is also about to get much more competitive. Dollarama is taking The Reject Shop’s 395 stores and talking about 700 by 2034, Aldi is pushing general merchandise through more than 600 stores and Big W is under pressure from both sides. The retailers who come out of that well will not be the cheapest. They will be the ones who were visible in the weeks before the occasion, when the shopper was still deciding where to go.
Halloween is a great example because the deadline is fixed and the basket is unfamiliar. But this dynamic is not seasonal, it’s mirrored in sales periods like Back to School, occasions like a first baby, a party, a renovation, a bulk buy, even Christmas entertaining: any basket without a habit attached is a retailer decision waiting to be influenced. In most categories those baskets are worth more per trip than the routine ones, and they are contested by far fewer people.
For the next fortnight, half a billion dollars will move through an occasion plenty of Australians still claim not to care about, into stores most of them have not chosen yet.
The brands and retailers who win it will be the ones who turned up before the car keys came off the hook.
