Costco Shut Down Its Third-Party Marketplace With Zero Warning, Right After Calling It a Growth Story
Costco Next, the retailer's curated third-party marketplace, disappeared over Labor Day weekend with no announcement, no customer notice, and no public explanation. Visitors to CostcoNext.com are now redirected to a support page reading simply: “Access to Costco Next store fronts is no longer available,” followed by a list of partner vendors and their contact information for returns and warranty claims.
That abrupt ending is genuinely strange given what Costco itself said about the program just months earlier, and it's worth understanding as a real cautionary tale in platform risk, regardless of which retailer you sell through.
What Costco Next Actually Was
Costco Next launched in 2017 as a curated version of the marketplace model Amazon popularized, with one meaningful difference. Rather than opening the platform broadly to any third-party seller, Costco's own buyers worked directly with a selected group of partner vendors, offering members access to products that never made it into an actual Costco warehouse. Items shipped straight from the partner company rather than through Costco's own fulfillment network.
Costco quietly kept the program low-profile the entire time it operated. It wasn't heavily promoted, and plenty of longtime members reportedly had no idea it existed at all.
Costco Was Calling This a Growth Story Just Months Before Killing It
Here's the detail that makes this shutdown genuinely puzzling rather than an obvious, telegraphed wind-down. On Costco's third-quarter fiscal 2025 earnings call, CFO Gary Millerchip described the program in explicitly positive terms: “Costco Next, our curated marketplace, also continues to show healthy year-over-year growth. In Q3 fiscal year 2025, our sales on Costco Next equaled our total sales for all of fiscal year 2022, and we are excited about the pipeline of new vendors and development for future rollout.”
That's not the language of a company preparing to shut a program down. It's a specific, quantified growth claim, an entire year's worth of prior sales compressed into a single quarter, paired with an explicit statement about expanding the vendor pipeline going forward. Costco has not issued any public statement explaining the reversal, and media requests for comment, including from multiple outlets, have gone unanswered as of this writing.
This Isn't the First Time a Major Retailer Has Done This
Costco isn't alone in walking back a third-party marketplace experiment after building real momentum. Kroger quietly shut down the third-party product side of Kroger Ship back in March 2025, confirmed only through a note added to the platform's FAQ page rather than any formal announcement. Kroger Ship had launched in 2018, added third-party products in 2020, and expanded further through a 2022 partnership with Bed Bath & Beyond before that side of the business was cut, with customers redirected toward pickup and delivery of Kroger's own grocery inventory instead.
That pattern, a real, multi-year marketplace buildout ended abruptly and communicated as quietly as possible, suggests this kind of reversal isn't necessarily about the third-party channel underperforming. It may reflect internal strategic priorities shifting in ways that never become public, regardless of how the numbers on the marketplace side were actually trending.
Why This Matters Even If You've Never Sold Through Costco Next
The lesson here isn't really about Costco specifically. It's about what happens when your distribution depends entirely on a channel you don't control, even one attached to a retailer as large and stable as Costco. Vendors who built real revenue through Costco Next reportedly lost that entire distribution channel with no transition period and no warning, despite the program's own CFO publicly describing it as growing and expanding just months earlier.
If a meaningful share of your revenue runs through any single marketplace or retail partnership, treat that concentration as a real business risk worth actively managing, not a stable, permanent arrangement simply because the channel appears to be performing well. A platform's own recent earnings commentary, even genuinely positive commentary from executives with access to the real numbers, is not a reliable guarantee that the channel will still exist in six months. Diversifying across multiple sales channels isn't just about maximizing reach. It's protection against exactly this kind of abrupt, unexplained reversal.
