Walmart Is Erasing the Wall Between Itself and Sam’s Club
Sam Walton built Sam's Club as a deliberately separate operation when he founded it in 1983, its own culture, its own systems, its own identity from the Walmart stores that made him famous. Over the past two years, Walmart has been steadily taking that wall down, not at the storefront level shoppers see, but at the level that runs the business: Supply chain, ecommerce technology, and advertising.
The most recent move landed in June, when Walmart rebranded Sam's Club's retail media network as Sam's Club Connect, aligning it more closely with the Walmart Connect ads business through shared technology, tools, and platforms. If you sell through either Walmart or Sam's Club, or you're weighing whether to start, this consolidation changes some real assumptions about how those two businesses will operate going forward.
How We Got Here
The first move came in 2024, when Sam's Club's corporate supply chain team began merging with Walmart's own supply chain division. Walmart's head of supply chain operations at the time, David Guggina, framed it as building “a supply chain that is future-ready to serve both Sam's Club and Walmart for the long term.” No job cuts were announced, and Sam's Club employees were told they'd get access to Walmart's broader enterprise systems and a clearer internal career path.
That was infrastructure most shoppers never noticed. The next move was visible. In September 2025, Sam's Club rolled out a new front-end experience for its website and mobile app that mirrors the design and functionality of Walmart's own digital properties. If you've compared the two apps recently and noticed they look and feel similar in a way they didn't used to, that's the result of a technology consolidation happening one layer at a time.
Then came advertising. Earlier this year, Walmart U.S. chief growth officer Seth Dallaire was promoted to chief growth officer for the entire company, taking on oversight of Sam's Club's retail media network alongside Walmart's. Walmart framed the move at Cannes in June as increasing alignment across Walmart Connect US, Walmart Connect International, and Sam's Club through shared technology, tools, platforms, and capabilities, positioning it as necessary to compete at the scale modern commerce media requires.
What's Coming Next
Sam's Club's ecommerce chief, Greg Pulsifer, has said the back-end consolidation isn't finished. It's rolling out in phases, starting with curbside pickup and delivery infrastructure, and building toward full technological parity between Sam's Club and Walmart's systems.
That's worth knowing if you're a supplier trying to plan around this. The integration isn't a one-time rebrand you can absorb and move past. It's an ongoing, multi-year project, and the systems you're working with today on either platform are likely to keep changing as more of this rolls out.
Why the Ad Business Consolidation Matters Most for Sellers
Of everything happening here, the retail media alignment has the most direct impact if you advertise on either platform. Walmart Connect and Sam's Club's advertising arm, historically called MAP, have run as separate systems, even though they're serving overlapping suppliers and running on similar underlying technology. Industry observers have pointed out for a while that this separation never made much operational sense. If the same supplier is running campaigns on both banners using comparable tools, combining the back end reduces duplicated work without necessarily changing how the campaigns look to shoppers.
For sellers running ad spend across both Walmart Marketplace and Sam's Club, watch for consolidated reporting, shared campaign tools, and potentially shared account management as this rolls out further. That's the practical upside. The thing to watch for on the other side is whether combined ad infrastructure eventually means shared minimum spend requirements or bidding dynamics between two audiences that have historically behaved differently. Sam's Club skews toward bulk-buying, higher-income members, while Walmart's base is broader and more price-sensitive.
What Won't Change, According to Walmart
Despite all this back-end consolidation, Walmart has been clear that the customer-facing storefronts are staying separate. Analysts covering the retail space don't expect Walmart to ever merge the actual shopping experiences, since the difference between the two formats, warehouse club versus general merchandise, is core to why each one works for its own audience. Sam's Club and Walmart will keep running as two business organizations driving their own advertising revenue and supplier relationships, even as the infrastructure underneath becomes shared.
That matters for how you should think about this if you sell on either platform. This isn't Walmart absorbing Sam's Club into a single marketplace. It's Walmart making the operational side more efficient while keeping the two audiences and shopping experiences separate.
What to Do If You Sell on Either Platform
If you're already selling through Sam's Club's supplier program or Walmart Marketplace, or considering starting on either, treat this as an active, ongoing shift rather than a settled state. Systems and advertising tools tied to either platform are likely to keep changing as Walmart continues this rollout, phase by phase, through at least the next year or two based on Pulsifer's own timeline.
If you're currently running separate strategies, separate creative, and separate reporting workflows for Walmart Marketplace and Sam's Club specifically because the two platforms have run on different backend systems, that justification is getting weaker every quarter. Watch for consolidated reporting tools and shared ad platform access as Sam's Club Connect and Walmart Connect continue combining, since building your workflows around that convergence now will save you a harder migration later.
