Sam's Club Rolls Out Scan & Ship In-Store Program

On Tuesday, Sam’s Club announced its new feature, Scan & Ship, allowing customers to purchase Sam’s Club items using their mobile app and then have the products shipped directly to their homes. According to CNBC, the membership club is testing this feature as “a way to improve the customer experience.” The convenience of Sam’s Club items being shipped to the home is a vast difference from a normal Sam’s Club purchase, which often requires heavy lifting. Scan & Ship is an addition to Sam’s Club's popular feature Scan & Go, which allows mobile app users to ring up their items in-store. Scan & Go, first launched in 2016, gained 44 percent more users over the past year, CNBC reported. One goal of Scan & Ship is to bring in-person and online shopping together, CEO Kathryn McLay stated.

Total Retail’s Take: Scan & Ship is one of several new technological and customer experience advances Sam’s Club has made over the past few years, including Scan & Go, Sam's Club Now, and curbside pickup. These additions make the customer experience easier, more convenient, and accessible, across all channels, which can lead to increased loyalty. Customers have come to expect and in many cases demand convenience from the retailers they purchase from. In many ways, Scan & Ship is a spinoff of other omnichannel services that retailers are offering customers, such as buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS) and curbside pickup of online orders, just in the reverse direction.