From the Performance Marketing Insider archive. Originally published August 2020. Revisited October 2026.

Inside Sam's Club's Affiliate Marketing Program

A warehouse club that sells memberships, not products, runs an affiliate program. That changes what a conversion is worth.

By Pesach Lattin

This post first ran on Performance Marketing Insider (performinsiders.com), the affiliate and lead generation trade site Pesach Lattin published from 2011 to 2020. The original text was lost when that site went dark. This page sits at the same address the old links point to, keeps the original headline and date, rebuilds the subject from the public record, and says what happened next.

Sam's Club is an odd fit for affiliate marketing, which is what made it worth a look in 2020. Most retail affiliate programs pay on a product sale. Sam's Club's real product is the membership, and a member who renews for years is worth far more than any single cart.

How the program works

The program runs on Rakuten Advertising, managed through Rakuten's partner dashboard. Mobile is where it got interesting: a case study from Button says its technology routed Rakuten affiliate links straight into the Sam's Club app, and claims a 165% increase in mobile affiliate revenue and an 81% higher conversion rate, with a Sam's Club marketing director calling affiliate a major engine for the mobile push. Those are vendor numbers, and should be read as such. We could not verify the program's 2020 commission terms; the figures on affiliate directories are unsourced.

How it aged

In 2023, Rakuten and RevLifter won an industry award for Sam's Club's affiliate strategy, with self-reported results beating membership goals. More important, Sam's Club built a media business on the same membership data. In 2022 it renamed its ad business the Member Access Platform, added self-serve sponsored search, partnered with The Trade Desk, LiveRamp and IRI, and in 2023 added open-web retargeting.

That is the arc of retail in the 2020s. A retailer starts by paying affiliates to bring in members, then realizes the members are the asset and starts selling access to them to its own suppliers. The affiliate program was the on-ramp. The retail media network was the destination.

This page rebuilds an August 2020 Performance Marketing Insider post whose original text is not available. Facts come from Button's case study and Hello Partner's awards coverage (both based on company-reported figures), MediaPost and Marketing Dive. ADOTAT separately covers Walmart Connect, Sam's Club's parent company's ad business.