20-yuan instant noodles, 399-yuan down jackets, why is the foreign-funded enterprise Sam's Club so adept at leveraging internet traffic?

Recently, Sam's Club has once again become a frequent trending topic generator.

First, Arc'teryx and Canada Goose appeared in its global shopping channel, with some products priced thousands of yuan lower than the brand's official flagship stores, and the price gap for certain items even approaching 5,000 yuan.

Then, a Master Kong instant noodle that works out to nearly 20 yuan per bag sparked a round of debates over whether it is worth buying.

On the other side, a long down jacket priced at 399.9 yuan with a down fill weight of about 300 grams sold out of available sizes in some stores due to its affordable price.

At the same supermarket, some products are discussed because they are expensive, while others are snapped up because they are cheap. These two completely opposite price trends have both brought it massive public attention.

Sam's Club seems to be exceptionally good at finding products that can make consumers stop, take a look, and talk about. People who intend to buy will study the ingredients, sizes and stock levels, and people who do not intend to buy can also share their opinions around the price.

A single price tag is often enough to generate a trending search.

This is quite interesting. Sam's Club is clearly a foreign-owned enterprise, so why is it so adept at leveraging internet traffic in China?

01 Treat Product Selection as Content Marketing

To understand Sam's Club, we can first look at how it recruits suppliers.

On Sam's official supplier recruitment page, the requirements for products include differentiation, high quality, attractive pricing, ease of display and promotion, and suitability for omni-channel sales.

Among these requirements, the item of ease of display and promotion clearly covers store layout, merchandising, product assortment and online selling point presentation. This point is worth deeper consideration.

When screening products, Sam's Club has already taken into account how the products will be displayed and how their selling points will be presented. Products themselves need to be of good quality, with clear selling points that are easy for consumers to understand, perceive their value, and introduce to others.

This logic of product selection is different from that of traditional supermarkets.

Traditional supermarkets need to consider whether a product sells well, its gross profit margin, and whether its supply is stable. Sam's Club only has several thousand SKUs, and every product needs a sufficient reason to be placed on the shelf.

With a limited number of products, the procurement team has to be more selective. Ideally, each product can meet a specific demand, or bring consumers some unexpected pleasant surprises.

For example, the several products that have recently hit trending searches all have three characteristics.

First, the sense of contrast.

Instant noodles priced at 20 yuan per pack, and down jackets with a 300g down fill weight priced at 399 yuan, both break consumers' inherent perception of the price range of traditional categories.

Second, verifiability.

Information including price, weight, ingredient list and down fill weight can all be directly photographed and presented. Consumers do not need to listen to brand stories, and can make judgments on their own.

Third, room for discussion.

Some people think the 20-yuan instant noodle is good value for money, while others argue that instant noodles should not be sold at such a high price; some people think the 399-yuan down jacket has extremely high cost-effectiveness, while others will further discuss the down cluster content, fluffiness and actual warmth retention effect.

With some people approving and others questioning, discussions are more likely to form.

Therefore, Sam's Club's products come with built-in communication materials.

02 Membership System Makes Price a Powerful Communication Tool

Chinese consumers are no strangers to communication methods based on high cost-effectiveness.

In 2011, the first generation Xiaomi mobile phone was priced at 1999 yuan; in 2024, the Xiaomi SU7 was launched with a starting price of 215,900 yuan. From mobile phones to automobiles, a specific price allows consumers to recalculate the configuration and budget, becoming a powerful bomb for public communication.

Why can Sam's Club frequently launch products with competitive prices? This involves its most important business model: the membership system.

Ordinary supermarkets mainly make profits from the price difference of products, and gross product margin is a very important source of profit.

Membership-based warehouse supermarkets have an additional source of income: membership fees.

At present, Sam's Club China has two tiers of membership: the regular membership and the Plus membership, with annual fees of 260 yuan and 680 yuan respectively.

As of the first half of 2026, the number of paid members of Sam's Club China has exceeded 10.7 million. Public reports show that in the 2026 fiscal year, Sam's Club China's omni-channel sales exceeded 140 billion yuan, and the annual revenue from membership fees alone is expected to approach 3 billion yuan.

Chris Nicholas, Global CEO of Sam's Club, once said in an interview that about half of Sam's Club's profits come from membership fees. The membership system also allows Sam's Club to strengthen supply chain management, making product prices much lower than ordinary retail prices.

The membership system has changed the profit model of retail enterprises.

Traditional supermarkets need to obtain profits from every product as much as possible, while Sam's Club can obtain a part of stable income through membership fees, and then reduce product costs through large-scale procurement, streamlining SKUs, increasing sales of individual products and developing private labels.

A single Sam's Club store only has several thousand SKUs, far fewer than traditional large supermarkets.

Fewer products mean that procurement can be more concentrated. Faced with Sam's Club's large-scale orders, suppliers are also more willing to offer competitive prices.

Membership fees, procurement scale and supply chain efficiency together constitute Sam's Club's price advantage.

And price itself is a very good type of communication content.

When consumers see a product and find that it is much cheaper than they expected, or the materials used far exceed their expectations, they will naturally be willing to share it.

This is exactly the case with Sam's Club's 399-yuan down jacket.

When consumers find that a long down jacket with a down fill weight of about 300 grams is sold for only 399 yuan, this price itself is enough to become an entry point for widespread sharing.

Sam's Club's membership system actually provides it with the ability to operate high cost-effectiveness in the long term.

03 Deep Integration into China's Supply Chain

Sam's Club entered China in 1996, and it has been 30 years up to now.

Over these 30 years, it has gradually completed a very important task: combining global retail experience with China's supply chain.

Many people have the impression that Sam's Club has many imported products and foreign brands, but in fact, many of Sam's Club's current best-selling products are backed by China's local supply chain.

Here are a few examples.

The 20-yuan instant noodle that recently hit trending searches is a channel-exclusive customized product co-developed by Sam's Club and Master Kong.

The 399-yuan down jacket comes from the third-party brand ROKKA&ROLLA, whose manufacturer is located in Tai'an, Shandong Province.

A large number of products under Sam's Club's private label Member's Mark are also manufactured by Chinese enterprises.

For example, Sam's Club's sugar-free sesame crisp is produced by Sichuan Huang Laowu Food, and the popular social media-famous mochi is supplied on a long-term basis by frozen baking enterprise Ligao Foods.

This system has two major advantages.

On the one hand, China's manufacturing industry has extremely strong cost control and large-scale production capabilities, which can help Sam's Club achieve better cost-effectiveness.

On the other hand, Sam's Club can introduce its own quality standards and supplier management system into the production process to improve the stability of products.

Looking further at the consumer side, there is another reason why Sam's Club is included in the regular procurement lists of many families: it saves effort.

When buying things for the family, the unit price is only one of the factors. The source of the meat, the ingredients of snacks, whether the children like the food, whether the package size is large enough, all these factors can make people spend a long time doing research. If a retailer can screen products in advance, consumers will spend less time comparing and hesitating.

The so-called alleviation of middle-class anxiety can be embodied in such a specific action: after you finish shopping, you do not need to spend the whole night confirming whether you have made the wrong choice.

This is an expectation of trust, which also means that every time Sam's Club sells a product, it uses its own brand name to take responsibility for this choice.

04 Social Media Turns Sam's Club Members into Communicators

Sam's Club members have a special identity.

They are both consumers and potential content creators.

After buying a product home, people can take photos, make unboxing videos, write reviews, weigh the product and compare prices, then share the content on Xiaohongshu, Douyin and WeChat groups.

The topic of Sam's Club's dual-effect laundry detergent pods on Xiaohongshu has more than 5 million views and over 8,000 discussions, with a large amount of content being user-generated machine washing comparison experiments.

The Swiss roll is even more impressive, with annual sales exceeding 100 million boxes, accounting for 40% of the GMV of the baked goods category, and the total UGC content accumulated on social platforms exceeds 2.3 million pieces.

There are several layers of psychology behind this phenomenon.

The most superficial layer is the instinct to share good finds, which is no different from recommending a delicious noodle restaurant, it is human nature.

The second layer is to prove the correctness of one's own choice. After buying a product with very high cost-effectiveness, people want others to know that they have made a good purchase. Posting about the 399-yuan down jacket with 300g down fill weight is not just showing off the clothes, but showing off one's own good judgment.

The third layer is the desire for expression brought by price contrast. When a person finds that the same product is sold for 8,200 yuan elsewhere but only 6,499 yuan here, he will feel the excitement of picking up a bargain, and this excitement has to be shared to be fully realized.

The fourth layer is the most interesting. When some people think the product is not worth the price, they will also post about it. Under the trending post of the 399-yuan down jacket, the most active people are not those who praise the product, but those who argue about it. For Sam's Club, both negative comments and positive comments are traffic. As long as the discussions continue, the products will continue to be seen by more people.

As a result, Sam's Club gets an off-payroll content team. Even if only 1% of its 10.7 million members are willing to shoot content, that is 100,000 content creators.

Third-party institutions have estimated that the total views of topics related to Sam's Club on Xiaohongshu are close to 4 billion. This number has not been officially confirmed, but if you search for Sam's Club on Xiaohongshu, you will not be able to scroll to the end even after turning ten pages of results.

You can hardly tell whether those notes are Sam's Club's advertisements or spontaneous sharing from users.

The most cost-saving part of this business is that it turns advertising expenses into a sense of achievement for members.

05 Channel Brand > Supplier Brand

Looking back at these trending searches, you will notice a detail. The instant noodles are made by Master Kong, and the tag on the down jacket is printed with ROKKA&ROLLA, but in consumers' words, they all have the same prefix: Sam's Club's instant noodles, Sam's Club's down jacket.

In the past, supermarkets relied on famous brands to attract customers into the stores. Today, consumers start to use the name of a supermarket to name products made by different manufacturers. This change has more commercial value than several trending searches.

A previously unknown clothing brand can get its first chance to be tried on by consumers with the help of Sam's Club's reputation, and Sam's Club therefore has to take responsibility for the workmanship of a factory in Shandong and the meat ingredients in a bag of Master Kong instant noodles, facing evaluations that far exceed the scope of its physical stores.

How far can a retail enterprise go? Probably to the point that when a customer buys a good product back home, and their friend asks where they bought it, the customer is very happy to mention your brand name.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Xunkong's Marketing Revelations", author: Xunkong 2009, published with authorization from 36Kr.