As of the week of Sept. 1, Sam’s Club has rolled out a new presentation layer for its website and app to 100% of its members, its svp of e-commerce, Greg Pulsifer, told Modern Retail. The app has a new look and feel with what the company calls a “global intent center” in the top left corner, where customers choose a fulfillment option — pickup, curbside or ship-to-home — from the start of shopping in the app.

This allows the company to tailor and curate the experience based on which option they select and better communicate the difference between shipping and delivery. If guests select curbside, the app will “make sure that we’re getting them the items they purchased before so they can get in and out and choose a slot that’s most convenient for them,” Pulsifer said. When they select the ship-to-home channel, he added, “it’s a big opportunity for us to start to tweak the personalization model to start to show some of those items to them that they may not have known we have.”

Furthermore, it represents how the retailer is working to adapt its entire business to lean more into members shopping from home without sacrificing the experience in its clubs.

“It gives us that entryway into knowing what our members are looking for and creating those better experiences for them,” Pulsifer said. Some of the big wins of the new app experience, he added, are going to be the noticeable ones, such as faster load times and more elements to personalize.

The company will also be able to offer advertising more contextually in the app through its Member Access Platform (MAP) advertising business. In an interview with Modern Retail at Shoptalk earlier this year, Harvey Ma, vp and general manager of Sam’s Club MAP, said the company imagines advertising as a way to reinvest in clubs and improve the member experience through remodels or by raising employee wages.

Lastly, the product detail pages will have better video capabilities and larger spaces for imagery, Pulsifer said. The company had been rolling the new experience out slowly over six weeks, according to Pulsifer, beginning with 5% of overall traffic and Android users.

“As performance leveled and scaled — and we saw incremental value being added, and growth in our conversion rates and our average order values — then, we started to slowly roll it out to 100% of our members,” Pulsifer said.

Bridging clubs with e-commerce

The revamped app and web experience comes as the company has worked to reimagine how its stores work to complement its e-commerce business. This relationship is key as more than half of its e-commerce business is fulfilled from clubs, Pulsifer said.

The company designed two of its newest clubs, in Grapevine, Texas, and Tempe, Arizona, as digital playgrounds in which to test new technologies and initiatives to possibly scale up to other clubs. One of them is to remove checkout lanes in favor of customers using Scan & Go technology to check out.

Another one of those tests is to vastly expand the amount of space in the clubs dedicated to fulfillment; Tempe has about 7,000 square feet and Grapevine has almost 6,000, while the average company-wide is around 1,500 square feet.

“That doesn’t necessarily mean every club going forward is going to have 7,000 square feet of fulfillment space. It’s not the new prototype, it’s just what we’re going to test,” Pulsifer said. “A lot of that was based on the part of the business that’s growing and giving our associates proper space to be able to fulfill those items for members, especially in the curbside piece.”

The company has also been creative in bringing existing elements of the store experience online. For example, Sam’s Club announced in May that it had started pizza deliveries at most locations to encourage more online ordering. Sam’s Club made 24,000 pizza deliveries during the last week of August, according to Pulsifer.

“Not only does it add value to your Sam’s Club membership, but it’s also a surprise and delight,” Pulsifer said, adding that the company has even launched jewelry delivery in 107 clubs. “These activations are getting our members to engage with us on a more frequent basis.”

Sam’s Club’s e-commerce advantage

Karen Kelso, a vp for the research firm Kantar who covers mass retailers and warehouse clubs, said Sam’s Club offers conveniences that Costco cannot by leveraging Walmart’s vast fulfillment network and by delivering in-house rather than through a partner like Instacart.

“Particularly with Walmart, low prices have always been their cornerstone, but convenience is coming in a close second,” Kelso said. “Sam’s Club is really working to deliver that, as well. The convenience factor — making it easier for time-starved members to get what they need and want and do it quickly — will be, absolutely, a competitive advantage for Sam’s Club and hard to replicate for Costco.”

Still, the company will have to find the right balance of technology use in the clubs that doesn’t sacrifice the human connection or alienate less technology-adept members, Kelso said.

Kelso said that since the pandemic, when the retail industry embraced digital-only experiences, the pendulum has been swinging back toward in-person engagement between shoppers and employees. Leaning so heavily into e-commerce elements can make it difficult to encourage that, she added, noting that she believes that is something competitor Costco does particularly well.

“[Costco is] a humming place … where people gather, and I think that’s appealing in its own way. Technology being the main interaction might impede some of that human connection that is part of commerce, particularly in-store,” Kelso said. “Sam’s will have to figure out how they merge this, because folksy, friendly is part of Walmart’s DNA; I’m not quite sure how Sam’s is going to reconcile that with this efficiency, automation, digital-first perspective.”