Greg Pulsifer on Sam's Club Approach to Digital Innovation & AI | NRF 2025

Welcome back, everyone.

This is omnitalk Retail.

I'm Anne Mazinga.

I'm Chris Walton.

And we are here live still.

Chris.

Yes.

Still live.

Still live.

Still live.

Kicking in booth 4938, the Vision Group recording studio.

Come stop by the booth.

You can see us.

Will still be here today and tomorrow, and we'd love to see you and come say hi.

Thank you to everyone who's passed by already and checked in.

It's been so great to see everybody and hear from everyone.

It always means a lot whenever you guys stop by.

So thanks to everyone that has.

But now it's time for us to introduce our guest.

Here, sitting between Chris and myself, is Greg Holzfer, Sam's Club's SVP of E Commerce.

Greg, welcome to Omni.

Thanks for having me on.

I listen to your show all the time.

Thank you, Brad.

The Omni Awards is my favorite.

My favorite episode.

It's our favorite episode.

You guys do awards throughout the.

You guys do awards all the time?

Yeah, every month.

Yeah, we do.

Yeah.

The Omni stars the true people making a difference.

I think it's great.

For sure.

All right, so let's start out.

We always ask this question 10 when we start these conversations, but want to learn about your background and your role, so.

And we'd love to hear about your background.

We ask that question a lot.

Sometimes people tell us, sometimes they don't.

Sometimes they jump right into the role.

Let's hear it.

Yeah, I.

I could probably fill the whole thing up with my background, but I'll be.

I'll be relatively quick.

Okay.

So I have been in ecommerce for a long time.

I started in the late 90s.

I kind of fell into it.

Wow.

Okay.

Worked at a software company and we made software where you could translate Mac files on a PC, which is 19.

That was revolutionary.

This was revolutionary.

The front door.

No, for sure.

And then what?

The way it would work is you would mail us a check and then we would send back an activation code.

This is like bcg, like music house stuff we're talking about here.

You know, we were young and we was like, hey, like, why don't we just let people put their credit card online?

I've been reading about this E Commerce thing, and they're like, greg, that's stupid.

No one's ever going to put their credit card online.

It's not safe.

So we were like.

But like, you know, you guys figure it out.

So a bunch of us got together after work and figured it out, and I.

And I really, I fell into E commerce.

I feel fortunate for that.

So I've been in E commerce for a long time.

After that I worked mostly in direct to consumer environments at branded manufacturers.

Okay.

So very early on at Puma we brought E Commerce.

We were back.

This is going to be like a bingo of old technology.

But we brought our, we onboarded our e commerce businesses on Yahoo Shopping.

Okay.

Yahoo Shopping had a separate platform.

We brought that on board.

And then from there worked at New Balance.

I was in the Boston area, so there's a lot of forward apparel.

Worked at New Balance in a digital marketing environment.

Actually back then it was called interactive marketing because digital wasn't a word.

I was just talking about interactive with somebody yesterday.

It was like I was an interactive producer.

That's how I got on the projects at Target.

Yeah.

And then from there went to North Face, launched E Commerce at North Face to track the consumer environment and it was, was rocket ship.

Business was super fun job.

Still remember our first order.

I won't tell you her whole name, but her name was Sarah.

She placed it on August 8.

She bought a Borealis backpack.

Just like that's seeing that happen.

Not that I needed any more motivation for like this is a cool thing, I want to get involved in it.

But that was like a shot of adrenaline.

So did that for around 10 years.

Spent a little bit of time in CPG and most recently was at Apple on the online store side.

And now I'm at Sam's club and Wednesday is my one year anniversary.

Congratulations.

Happy anniversary.

Celebrating it with you.

Yes, Celebrating with us.

Yes.

Friends of Omnitalk.

So what I do now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So right now my team and I are responsible for the end to end digital experience at Sam's club.

So everything from downloading the app to the experience that members have when they land on the app or on the homepage, wherever they land on the site, making sure that those experiences are curated, personalized.

And then what I call like nuts and bolts, like navigation has to work.

Okay.

Search has to work.

Getting you to the product detail page, making sure there's rich content, making sure that the product descriptions are right, making sure that member reviews are positive and helpful.

Then getting you into the checkout and through the checkout and ultimately making sure that the order is delivered perfectly.

Got it.

So are you kind of the product head for E Commerce then?

No, I'm the business lead.

But we work.

But it's a great question.

I mean I feel like the best organizations, we're locked arm in arm with our product organization.

They're in all of our meetings.

I'm in all of their meetings.

Okay, so, so does.

Do you have merchandising too then?

Or does merchandising.

Yeah, so it's a great.

So interesting structure.

So we have a merchandising organization.

Okay.

Who they're omni merchants and they're responsible for buying products for.

For all channels.

We have digital merchants as well who bring those to life.

Okay.

So our Omni merchants, we have a, you know, Sam's club.

We have a curated assortment of items.

Make sure that those items can be purchased in any channel, wherever the member prefers.

So curbside pickup, ship to home or delivery.

And our E commerce merchants kind of bring that to life in partnership with our overall merchants.

Got it.

Okay, cool.

All right, good.

Gotta ask that question.

And is the assortment that you're pulling together then is that a separate assortment then for in store versus online?

I mean especially I think as it's feels like more consumers are used to shopping Sam's.

I feel like in the store, in the club, they're used to going in that way.

But now so much more has kind of started like your shopping experience has started online.

And there's other things available that you can offer like extend the aisle online.

How do you think about kind of the curation of both of those assortments and identifying what should be where?

Yeah, I love this question.

We are an omnichannel retailer, so our merchants are buying wherever we want to support our member however they want to shop.

Okay.

And I've got a great.

This is an Omni Talk discussion.

I have a great Omni stat for you.

Let's have the stats.

Omni stat.

Why are you holding back on us, Greg?

Sound effect for this.

So Omni stat.

More than half.

And this is a good one too.

I don't know.

I'm not overselling this.

Okay.

Okay.

You're in the know.

So more than half of our E commerce orders are fulfilled from a club.

Okay.

So the definition of omni.

So going back to your point of where does like how does the assortment work?

Right.

It works in ultimate convenience.

However, our members want to get that item.

We want to make sure that we can support them for that.

Now we do have an online, a smaller online only assortment like Treasure Hunty we know members love and that has really driven my team on the digital merchant side.

Sure plays a large part in that.

So we're doing research.

We have a new category called new and trending.

Okay.

So we're looking at social Media, we're looking at member feedback through search, we're looking at what's going on and we see if we can source those items.

And we have an online only assortment that is an opportunity for us to just again, differentiate from what we're doing across the rest of the organization and give members that like, again, that treasure hunt opportunity and excitement, freshness, bring people back to the site every month.

So, you know, retail fresh is super important.

How do you think about driving people to that assortment?

Like, because it's got to be different than, you know, especially if you mentioned like social and if this might be outside of kind of where you oversee things.

But how do you think about like getting people one to the site and then two to kind of help inspire that treasure hunt when they're not walking through a club and they're like sampling something or whatever.

Yeah.

I think this is the beauty of Sam's, where all of our arms are locked together.

So we have a membership team.

When the membership team, there's an onboarding component.

When someone becomes a member.

Part of that onboarding component is, hey, do you have the app?

Right.

You should download the app.

And then downloading the app is a tool and Scan and Go is a big part.

I've heard you guys talk about Scan and Go before.

We can talk about that in a minute if you'd like.

But that element of getting our members digitally engaged happens right from the beginning.

And then our strategy going forward is again making sure that we're creating personalized and curated experiences on the site so new and trending may show up in different parts of the merchandising flow based on how you engage.

Buying behavior is.

Right.

Right.

So basically you're trying to funnel the traffic wherever it's most important to that particular customer.

Yeah.

And then we use data and AI to try to figure out, like, are there any insights based on your purchase frequency, your purchase behavior that would make you more inclined, like not distract you from your mission, but also maybe send you a little wink, like, hey, have you seen this?

And we use our.

Again, a lot of the marketing messaging that we have and a lot of the tools that we use to draw awareness around that.

Especially the engaged Scan and Go customers too.

Yeah, I was going to say that's got to play into it too.

The fact that you're paying people back by enabling Scan and Go experiences in store gives me more incentive to download the app when I'm becoming a member too.

Yeah.

Scan and Go is unbelievable.

Our members love Scan and Go.

It has a 90 NPS.

Wow.

Which is pretty incredible.

And when we talk about scan and go internally, a huge opportunity for us is that.

Again, I have another omnistat for you.

I'm gonna bring this one up.

I mean, we two in one joke.

We do need some sort of graphic.

Right.

You should have warned us that you were gonna bring the stat.

I will tell you that.

I think this one's even better than the first one.

Storytelling.

First one was pretty good.

I'm building.

All right.

So our members are extremely omni.

Right?

Yeah.

We just talked about the fact that we buy for wherever the member wants to get.

So 41% of our in club shoppers.

So people walked in the club, have visited our site or app a week before making a purchase.

Which is cool, right?

Which is.

Okay.

Wow.

Drives 37% of our in club business.

So pretty incredible, right?

So to be able.

These are all.

This is like behavior that you're like.

Yeah, well, of course, people like research online to be able to back it up with data.

And then what gets measured gets managed.

So then you can start to say, okay, well, if we know this is the behavior that our members want, you know, they don't see the org charts.

They see Sam's.

They don't see channels.

Right.

They see Sam's.

So how do we start to use that data to start to create those amazing experiences for members?

And no convenience.

We.

If you want to get that item shipped to home, we can do that.

If you want to have it come from a club, we can do that.

But the combination of the two and using scan and go as that connective tissue between the digital and the physical world, where we can start to give you personalized recommendations based on what you're doing online.

Literally, in your hand when you're in the club is like the definition of omnichannel.

And you can do that.

And that's pretty cool.

And then I'll end with the final part of that is it's like a flywheel.

It fuels all of that in store data that we're collecting.

And the behavior from our members is fueling what we want to do going forward from a personalization engine.

So next time you're researching that product online, you're gonna get a personalized recognition based on what you did in the club and vice versa.

Right.

That's what's always been really impressive to me, is the data that you guys are collecting about how people are actually shopping both online and in store, which is fundamental to, like, scan and go at its core too.

And the Usage rate, they said yesterday.

We had Todd on yesterday, Todd Garner.

He said the usage rate is 30%.

30%?

Roughly one in three.

Todd's a great partner, by the way.

Work with him on talking about that.

Yeah, you gotta say that.

If you don't.

Yeah, he will.

All right, so let's shift gears here a little bit.

So you're at nrf.

Yes.

You.

You just came off stage, right?

Just came off stage, yes.

What did you share?

What did you tell the audience?

So we gave an update on personalization.

So we talked a lot about AI and how AI is driving our personalization.

Talked a lot about omnichannel, talked a lot about Scan and Go.

So it was a nice opportunity to get the word out there on those capabilities.

And what can you tell us more?

Like, what specific things did you say to the audience?

I think for us, the framework of personalization, I think personalization is like a nebulous term.

Yeah.

Digital personalization.

Don't get Chris into it.

It's a very sensitive term.

Will we personalize?

Okay, well, what does that mean?

So I really have a webpage.

Yeah, exactly.

I wanted to make sure.

And it's like.

And it's just, like, really good retail, too, right?

It is, yes.

But I was, you know, did a lot of planning for it, and I really wanted to try to break it down for the audience.

So I love frameworks and structure.

I'm a huge fan of, like, breaking things.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So just briefly broke it into three parts.

Okay.

Acquisition, experience, and retention.

On the acquisition side, probably the toughest part for us because we don't really know you yet, but we do know what works for our members.

So then we try to tailor that message to our members based on what we know works for other members.

Yeah.

Once we get you and we can engage you, we personalize everything from the message to the imagery to the tone in which we speak to you, which is pretty.

Pretty cool.

With a goal of getting you engaged, and then on the retention side, making sure that we're keeping you engaged, keeping you retained, rather by leaning into.

To convenience and making sure that the members are getting the most out of their membership based on their personal actions.

And then with a goal of that, the membership is going to pay for itself multiple times over.

So we look at breaking it out into those three is a pretty easy way to digest from a communication standpoint to our teams to our leadership.

And then from a member standpoint, I talk to the team all the time.

What gets measured, gets managed.

And breaking it out into Those three steps and having strategies around each of those and data to form those strategies has been a big win for us.

That was going to be my next question for you actually.

And I think I know the answer is having talked to other Sam's Club executives over the years, but how do you measure, what measurements do you use to evaluate how you're doing along those three steps?

Because we love the retail executives learn from you guys.

Yeah, well, so we're, we're, you know, we're super unique.

Right.

People pay to shop with us.

So we're a membership based business.

So everything is about membership membership.

So at the highest levels we look at like new members and retain members or we know if we give people a great experience, they're gonna, they're gonna be like this is a, this membership is like I mentioned on the retain side.

Like the membership should try to pay for itself multiple times over.

So we look, ultimately look at that and then a lot of times honestly it's, it's the standard metrics that you would look at for success like click throughs, conversion rate, spend units per transaction, net promoter score.

And that's what you measure.

Always talk about, which I'm always impressed.

Totally.

I think.

And I've, like I said, I listen to your show all the time and you've had other Walmart folks on and you talk about it.

But we, what's impressive about our organization is we measure every part of the buy flow, every engagement.

So from the second we talk to you to the second your order arrives, there is a metric and a stat.

Some of them are standard metrics that you look at and some of their proprietary metrics based on things that we do inside based on unique data that we have that's a competitive advantage secret sauce that we can look at each of those steps of the way to see if there's a problem.

We meet on Mondays.

We are completely exposed.

Our slide goes up on the screen in front of our CEO and our leadership team.

With every metric that we have, there is nowhere to hide.

So each of those steps of the way, if there's a metric and our business has been great, we report on this.

It's been, it's been an awesome year.

And we report on each of those metrics in that meeting.

And the ones they don't really want to talk about the good metrics, they want to talk about the ones to fix.

Yeah, yeah.

So the I always go the rest always something retail.

There's always something to chase.

It's a forever optimized business.

Yes.

Retail is detailed.

Another one of my favorite lines.

Well, Greg, I wanna touch on something that you mentioned specifically around personalization and the Scan and Go experience.

How are you doing that?

Or I guess what's different about how you are serving up content when I'm shopping online, like you said, I'm preparing for my Sam's trip and then the Scan and Go experience when I'm on my phone shopping in the store.

I'm sure there's some minutia there that we can get into here about how you're doing that.

Yeah.

I'll just explain it at a high level.

I think right now we know you're in the club, we can identify what club you're in.

Right.

And that's a big win.

We also have gentle cues along the way in the shopping experience where there'll be an extra discount if you Scan and Go.

I'm sure you've seen it in our clubs.

Right.

It's an extra.

Could be like a promotion based on using Scan and Go, which is a great way to get people to adopt it and use it.

But it's also collecting data.

Yes.

We know we're in the club that they're scanning it.

We know what they're scanning it.

And then that can help with the personalization piece.

Because.

Because if we know one item is next to another item, then maybe there's an opportunity to show that on a digital format.

Right.

And even I would imagine, like, how much incentive it takes to get somebody to pull up Scan and go.

Right?

Yeah, 100%.

Right.

So I want to nerd out for a little bit.

Just go on my E commerce back because you still get the chance to talk to folks like you.

So I'm curious, like, is there anything.

So when I'm like when I'm in with the Scan and Go app as an E commerce leader, is there anything that you're particularly focused on that's more important to get right than say a traditional E commerce experience?

Like, traditional e commerce experience, you gotta get checkout, right?

Yeah.

You gotta have an awesome pdp.

Is there anything in the.

In.

When I'm in the store with that app, is there anything you have to get right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Love it.

So cool.

You love, like talking about optimization and the key parts.

So I would say some of it, like on a website.

Yeah.

You want to make sure it loads quickly.

Right, Right.

Like, doesn't get talked about a lot, but there's significant data that shows the longer it takes to load a page.

The lower the conversion, doing the yeah.

It'S not that different for scanning.

It's gotta look quick.

So if you think about this, right, like cell reception is critically important, we have wifi in the clubs, but you're.

Still in a concrete box.

So I look at from a standpoint of when I look at the data I scrutinize in one of the key metrics I look in is the load time.

Like how quickly is it gonna come?

And then from there it's the same thing.

In E commerce, we're reducing friction.

So how easily can it be knowing that if you're think about a, the three of us are gonna go shopping, we're pushing a carriage, we may or may not have kids, we may or may not have friends with us.

It's gotta be super easy.

If I'm holding a phone in my hand, it has to be simple.

I love that you said that it.

Has to be simple.

That's not something that people think about is how even with like the carts that you see, it's like people are not just coming in hands free doing this anymore.

So it's gotta be super simple.

We look at honestly like your thumb, like where is your thumb?

Where is the reach of your thumb?

Yeah.

On the, on the, on the phone and where are the buttons based on where your thumb can reach and try to make that, reduce that.

So there's really two things there then.

So there's the load time and then like being able to manipulate everything with one hand.

Like the human centered design that you keep talking about.

Yeah, A term for making it as adaptable as possible to imagine.

Right.

Okay, you're at nrf.

Yes.

What technology are you looking at?

Well, if I don't say AI, do I get kicked out of the.

Not from us.

No, no, you're fine.

We're all about pragmatism here.

Yes.

Let's be real.

I'll say from an AI standpoint, not on the technology side, but like use cases I think are pretty cool.

I mentioned that more than half of our business is fulfilled from a club.

So anything like club fulfilled.

There's got to be innovation around curbside and delivery.

So look into that.

The other thing I will say is that I love.

And then this is like old school but just like plain data.

But I love real time data.

So we have, my team will tell you we have a dashboard that we created that we look at that shows the real time data across a lot of our key metrics.

It's not that you're going to action on it right now, but it Gives you a view into how the business is doing and where some of the problems are.

So I haven't seen a lot of technology around real time monitoring and real time data, but I love it.

It's like theater.

Yeah.

Like, especially during like busy days, like busy days of the week and during the holidays.

I mean, you remember what Sarah's.

I remember Sarah's backpack order.

It was white, white, white Borealis backpack.

She lived in North Carolina.

This is in 2008.

That's awesome.

Yeah, awesome.

All right, since you brought it up, let's get you out of here on this.

You brought up AI.

So we, we, we'd lose our, our media card if we didn't ask you this question.

I think honestly, where do you expect AI to impact the Sam's Club business in your role the most in 2025?

Yeah.

I'll start off by saying that AI is absolutely going to permeate every part of the business.

That sounds like cliche, but it's true.

It's going to happen for us right now.

The, the biggest, I'll give you two, the biggest area is around personalization.

It quite literally is the personalization engine that we have.

We use AI, so we're doing that.

As mentioned, we just gave a speech on that.

The other one is on search.

So our on site search using AI to do.

To predictive, you know, get a better predictive estimate of what people looking for.

We're a curated assortment business, so we're not going to have everything.

Yeah.

But if we can start to use AI to make a connection, we may not have this, but we do have this.

Yeah, like those are the types of things that we're using for right now.

Oh, I was just gonna say are you using some of the generative AI technology that Walmart has used too, in search?

Like is that part of what you'll be looking at?

We're looking.

Yeah.

So on the.

Everything's on the.

Like, like a forever optimized business.

Everything's on the roadmap.

I think from a generative AI standpoint for us right now, one of the things we do use AI for is for the subject lines for our marketing messages.

Okay.

Okay.

Which is which I have another stat for you if you want.

So along those lines, talking about performance, the.

The AI generated subject lines for our marketing messages outperforms humans at a rate of 95%.

Oh, wow.

Wow.

That's crazy.

That was going to be similar to my question for you.

Follow up would be, you know when you say AI is going to impact personalization.

I'm curious on what angle of the personalization you expect to see the impact the most.

Is it like on the insights?

Is it on helping generate more content against the insights?

Is it yes.

And like, how do you think about it?

I think it's yes.

And it's I think you have such a small window of opportunity to get someone's attention.

So it starts with getting their attention and then you can lose it if you don't have a great recommendation.

If you're like, this isn't relevant to me or I already bought this, why are you showing me this?

So it's really again going back to like nailing the basics and the fundamentals of it.

Just because it's AI doesn't mean that you lose the retail fundamentals.

Right.

Of driving the good business.

Awesome.

Well, Greg, thank you so much.

I know Stats, you brought the real time data.

You showed us how your impeccable memories.

Thank you so much again, Greg Pulsar from Sam's Club.

Also, thanks again to the Fusion Group for hosting all of our live content coverage from NRF 2025.

Stay tuned.

We still have more to come today and tomorrow you can come see us here in booth 4938 if you are at the show.

And until then, be careful out there.