Sam’s Club Just Changed the Rules for Shared Memberships

Sam’s Club tightens its Friends & Family Card rules

On October 9, Sam’s Club posted a draft revision of its Membership Bylaws for public comment. The new clause says: starting from the date a Friends & Family Card is first activated, every 365 days, the real-name identity linked to that card can activate the Friends & Family Card of only two individual primary card members. It can activate only one at a time. If no changes are made after the comment period, it takes effect on October 16, 2026.

Customer service put it more plainly: the rule does not affect primary card members. It affects people holding Friends & Family Cards, who can bind one only twice a year. Asked if the goal was to stop supplementary card resale, the representative said, “You could say that,” and added that membership benefits sold on secondhand platforms may be affected.

How a Friends & Family Card gets sold in pieces

The card-sharing business on secondhand platforms has run for years. A common process goes like this: the buyer pays a 10-yuan service fee, gets instructions, and spends 260 yuan to open a primary card through Sam’s Club’s official channel. After the card opens, the seller buys back the Friends & Family Card included with the primary card for about 110 yuan and refunds the 10-yuan fee. The buyer pays 150 yuan and gets a primary card. The seller lists the Friends & Family Card at a markup.

Buyers of Friends & Family Cards are asked for their name, mobile number, and ID information. The seller enters that information into the binding page in the Sam’s Club app and activates the card. When the buyer no longer needs it, the seller unbinds it and binds the same card to the next person. The primary card holder does not have to show up. They tap “unbind,” then “rebind.”

Previously, Sam’s Club had no limit on how often the same real-name identity could bind a Friends & Family Card. One person could repeatedly activate the Friends & Family Cards of different primary cards. A single card could be sold in rotation to dozens of people. The primary card holder could dilute the annual fee by selling one card many times. Sam’s Club’s membership fee revenue was diluted with every unbind and rebind. A user who should have paid 260 yuan could get in through a secondhand channel for 150 yuan or less. The difference went to the scalper.

After 10.7 million members, a loophole started costing money

Data cited by multiple outlets shows Sam’s Club China has more than 10.7 million paid members and annual membership fee revenue near 3 billion yuan. Walmart China says Sam’s Club added 10 stores in 2025. By May 2026, it had 67 stores nationwide, with double-digit transaction growth. Some stores do more than 2 billion yuan in annual sales.

For membership warehouse stores, profit does not come mainly from selling goods. It comes from membership fees. Merchandise sales barely make money, or run at a slight loss. Profit comes from the 260-yuan or 680-yuan threshold. The threshold filters for people willing to pay for quality and gives Sam’s Club bargaining power with suppliers. At 10.7 million members, repeated resale of Friends & Family Cards was no longer just “a few more customers coming in.” People who open a primary card pay an annual fee. People who buy a Friends & Family Card on a secondhand platform get a similar shopping qualification for less. Membership identity was being split into admission tickets sold one by one.

Sam’s Club places the binding force on the real-name identity linked to the Friends & Family Card. The same identity can bind the Friends & Family Cards of at most two primary card members every 365 days, and can activate only one at a time. The draft gives an example: activate primary card member A’s Friends & Family Card on November 1, 2026. Want to activate primary card member B’s card on January 1, 2027? Unbind A’s card first. If you activate B’s card and then delete it, you cannot activate anyone else’s Friends & Family Card before October 31, 2027.

In stores, they check the person. In the app, they check the card.

Before the new rule, Sam’s Club had already tightened verification in physical stores. In September, a consumer brought family members to shop and left midway for an errand. The family was stopped at checkout. The cashier said the card holder had to be present. The consumer called customer service. The answer: even if kinship could be proven, or confirmed by phone or video, someone else still could not check out for the card holder. Online, people called the membership card a “hostage card.” Once the person leaves, the card stops working.

At the same time, supplementary cards, single-use cards, and purchasing agents kept selling on secondhand platforms. People without a membership card pay a service fee of a dozen yuan or so. Someone brings them into the store and helps them check out. Some sellers offer “sign up, then cancel”: the consumer pays 260 yuan to open a card, the seller handles cancellation, charges 1.68 yuan, and claims internal cooperation with Sam’s Club, guaranteeing a successful cancellation.

Offline verification uses the person as the unit. Online binding uses the card as the unit. A family cannot share one membership. Strangers can repeatedly buy Friends & Family Cards through unbinding and rebinding. The rule’s logic split in two in real use. The new rule closes the online rebinding gap. The offline half of the crack is still there.

The 365-day limit leaves other openings

The new rule does not cancel the Friends & Family Card. A primary card member can still give the card to a fixed family member or friend for long-term use. Two people can still share one membership. What is affected is high-frequency rebinding, repeated resale, and switching back and forth among multiple primary cards.

Account rental is not constrained by this rule. Purchasing agents, one-day trial cards, and store entry services continue on Douyin and Xiaohongshu. Some sellers ask buyers for name, mobile number, and ID information to bind a Friends & Family Card. Others sell “single-use cards” and agree on a time to meet at the store. Zhuang Shuai, founder of Bailian Consulting, told National Business Daily that Sam’s Club’s binding restrictions are meant not only to crack down on scalpers but also to drive paid membership growth. Large numbers of scalpers on e-commerce platforms resell Sam’s Club supplementary cards in a loop, diverting potential card-opening users.

Several details remain unexplained. Do rebinding records before the rule takes effect count? Does rebinding the same primary card member after unbinding count repeatedly? From which day does the 365-day period start for users who already activated a Friends & Family Card? These will affect how existing members use their cards.

Once expansion accelerated, management got coarser

On June 15, the State Administration for Market Regulation summoned the person in charge of Walmart (China) Investment Co., Ltd. for talks over frequent food safety problems at Sam’s Club’s offline stores and online shops. According to incomplete statistics, from the second half of 2025 to the time of the talks, Sam’s Club had at least 11 food safety controversies: excessive pesticide residue on scallions at the Chengdu store, a live rat found in a box of mochi at the Shenzhen store, excessive heavy metals in organic freeze-dried strawberries, abnormal slaughter dates on chilled meat, and maggots in udon soup broth.

On the same day as the talks, the legal representative and chairman of Walmart China changed. Two days later, Sam’s Club’s chief merchandising officer was confirmed to have resigned for personal reasons and formally left at the end of June. In September, Sean Jackson, a senior Sam’s Club executive in the United States with 30 years of retail procurement experience, was appointed chief merchandising officer of Sam’s Club China. He previously oversaw non-food categories at Sam’s Club U.S., including home, general merchandise, 3C, apparel, and seasonal goods. He also handled procurement for consumer goods and health and wellness categories.

As stores expanded from a few dozen to nearly seventy and membership grew from several million to 10.7 million, product selection loosened. In July 2025, Sam’s Club removed high-repurchase products such as sun cakes, rice pudding, and low-sugar egg yolk pastries. It replaced them with more common brands such as Orion, Weilong, and Liuliu Mei. Members questioned on social platforms whether the brand tone conflicted with Sam’s Club’s positioning. The once “fewer but better” 4,000 SKUs blurred their boundaries as local product selection authority was decentralized.

In social media discussion data, negative sentiment in the “price mechanism and governance” section rose to 72%. In the “value and decision impact” dimension, positive evaluations were 39%, negative 61%. One summary: intellectually, you know it may still be cheap. Emotionally, it no longer feels worth it.

What is on the shelf decides whether members renew

Costco has far fewer stores in mainland China than Sam’s Club. It uses streamlined SKUs, high-quality low-price private-label brands, and actively limited gross margins to build a price advantage in core categories. After Hema shut down its X membership stores, its “Move the Mountain” pricing directly targeted Sam’s Club’s core items, forcing Sam’s Club to adjust prices multiple times. Metro brought in Andrew Miles, former president of Sam’s Club China, as a consultant, trying to make a renewed push in the membership store track.

In responding to the new rule, Sam’s Club customer service said membership cards sold on secondhand platforms come from unknown sources and their benefits cannot be guaranteed. Once the primary card holder unbinds the supplementary card, the supplementary card immediately becomes unusable. The statement points to one goal: Sam’s Club wants everyone who walks into a store to pay 260 yuan through official channels. After they pay, whether the beef, mochi, Swiss rolls, roast chicken, and Member’s Mark paper towels on the shelves can make them click “renew” without hesitation the following year is another test.

After October 16, the Friends & Family Card binding page in the Sam’s Club app will have one more line of small print: every 365 days, at most two primary cards. Some people will open a primary card because of that line. Some will turn to purchasing agents. Some will keep sharing a Friends & Family Card with a fixed friend. The line at the checkout counter will keep moving. The barcode scanner will beep once. The membership code will light up once.