Dive Brief:
- Costco’s investment in online personalization is having a measurable impact on e-commerce sales, executives said on a Q2 2026 earnings call Thursday.
- The personalized product recommendation carousels drove more than $470 million in e-commerce sales during the quarter, according to EVP and CFO Gary Millerchip. Modernized product display pages are driving incremental traffic as well.
- “We have a clear road map for future digital enhancements and believe these will allow us to continue to grow digitally-enabled sales at a faster pace than overall sales,” Millerchip said on the call.
Dive Insight:
Costco is working to deliver faster and more seamless experiences for its customers, whether they are shopping in-store or online.
Digital enhancements have helped the warehouse club keep up with its growing membership while making it easier for customers to shop, according to President and CEO Ron Vachris.
“Traffic has been significantly up, and the adoption of the new digital enhancements have really allowed us to maintain the staffing we have in place and then handle this new growth of volume we’re seeing,” Vachris said. “It’s improving the member experience and it’s making the throughput much better, be it the pharmacy app that we’ve developed or the pay ahead that we have in our warehouses.”
Costco has seen “meaningful improvements” in speed of checkout and employee productivity due to its digital wallet enhancements, pharmacy pay ahead and employee pre-scan technology, Vachris said. The company is also piloting scan-and-go stations that reduce the average transaction time to about eight seconds.
“Early results show this is improving the flow of traffic, and we’ve received great member feedback,” Vachris said.
Costco’s U.S. comparable store sales rose 5.9% year over year in the second quarter of 2026, according to an earnings release. Net sales rose 9.1% year over year to $68.2 billion.
Membership is continuing to grow, according to Millerchip. The company ended the second quarter of 2026 with 82.1 million total paid members, up 4.8% year over year.
