Selling to Costco

In the first 36 weeks of fiscal 2026, Costco Wholesale collected 4.06 billion dollars in membership fees and reported 7.88 billion dollars of operating income. Roughly half the profit came from the fee, not from the merchandise.

That ratio tells you more about selling to Costco than any org chart. The company makes its money by charging 81.0 million paid members for the right to buy at very thin margin, then defending that thinness with everything it has. Selling, general and administrative expense was 9.25 percent of net sales in fiscal 2025. Any cost you propose to add is measured against a base the company has spent four decades keeping lean.

"Selling to Costco" usually means getting on a shelf. This page is about the other thing.

Search the phrase and you get merchandise: how to get a product into a warehouse, how to pitch a buyer, how to survive the volumes. That population of vendors is far larger, and it dominates the query.

This page is about selling software, cloud, data, security, infrastructure or professional services to Costco Wholesale Corporation as a corporate buyer. Your product never reaches a pallet, and almost nothing written about becoming a Costco supplier applies to you.

How the buying process actually runs

There is no supplier portal, and that is the single most important operational fact about this account. Costco's own Vendor Inquiries page does not send you to Ariba, Coupa or any registration system. It gives a corporate mailing address, PO Box 34331 in Seattle, a street address on Lake Drive in Issaquah, and then eight United States regional division offices and a dozen international ones, each listed with a street address and a telephone number. That is the published front door.

Sellers read the absence of a portal as an opening. It is the opposite. A portal is a queue you can join without knowing anyone. With no queue, routing is done by people, and the way in is to be routed by someone who already has standing inside.

The one intake form Costco does publish is merchandising. The Supplier Inclusion programme says a member of the merchandising team will follow up, and states plainly that completing the application does not guarantee a business partnership. Useful if you make a product. Not your path if you sell enterprise technology.

The cost culture is written down, and suppliers are in it. Costco publishes a five-line code of ethics: obey the law, take care of our members, take care of our employees, respect our suppliers, reward our shareholders. Suppliers rank fourth of five, ahead of shareholders. Read that correctly: it is a commitment to treat you straight, not to pay more than it has to.

Expect the SKU discipline to apply to you. Costco carries fewer than 4,000 active stock keeping units per warehouse, which its 10-K notes is significantly less than other broadline retailers. The operating model rests on choosing one item per need and buying it in volume. A company that runs its shelves that way is not looking to add a fourth tool in a category where it already has one. Your question is not "can we get in" but "what are we replacing".

Time it against a fiscal year that ends in August. Costco's fiscal year closes on the Sunday nearest the end of August, and its 10-K states that the material seasonal impact on operations is increased sales and earnings during the winter holiday season. That puts peak trading in the second quarter, in the middle of the fiscal year rather than at the end of it, so the change freeze and the budget cycle do not line up the way they do at retailers on a January year end. September and October are the useful months. November through early January are not.

Who owns what, so you know where your deal belongs

You will not be selling to these people. Their remits tell you which part of the company your deal sits in, and whose priorities it must survive further down.

Ron M. Vachris is Chief Executive Officer, President and a director. John Sullivan is Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary.

Names taken from Costco's proxy statement and SEC filings, verified 12 September 2026. Senior roles change. Verify at source before using any name.

Why you cannot sell into this account from the bottom

A deal that justifies the cost of selling here runs to seven figures a year, and infrastructure runs higher over a multi-year term. At Costco the altitude required to approve that is higher than the revenue alone would suggest, because the company's identity is built on not spending money.

Two published numbers make the point better than any anecdote. For fiscal 2025 Costco's Chief Executive Officer was paid a salary of 1,183,270 dollars. Each non-employee director earned 37,000 dollars in cash for board service alongside a restricted stock unit grant, and the proxy notes that board members receive a free Costco executive membership. That is not a company where a seven figure software contract gets waved through by a director of engineering.

The layer that matters sits below the published names, and it is unusually hard to map

Costco names a small number of executive officers and little else. The people who will sponsor your purchase sit one or two levels below, inside a technology organisation concentrated at the Issaquah campus rather than spread across several metros.

What makes that layer hard to reach is the company's own retention. Costco's 10-K describes a commitment to promoting from within, and reports that in fiscal 2025 approximately 94 percent of United States and Canada employees with at least a year of service stayed. The current Chief Executive Officer moved up through warehouse operations, real estate development and merchandising over decades before reaching the top job. So the internal network is dense, long-formed and largely invisible from outside, and it is not populated by people who arrived last year from a company you already sell to. Working out who in your own network actually reaches into it is what a relationship intelligence platform exists to do.

The board is a published second-degree map

Costco's shareholders elected ten directors at the annual meeting on 15 January 2026. Where they sit elsewhere is the most actionable list here.

• Hamilton E. James, non-executive Chairman of the Costco board, chairman of his family investment firm Jefferson River Capital, and formerly Executive Vice Chairman and earlier President and Chief Operating Officer of Blackstone.
• Susan L. Decker, founder and Chief Executive Officer of Raftr and the lead independent director of Berkshire Hathaway, also a director of Vail Resorts, Chime Financial, Vox Media and Automattic, and formerly President of Yahoo.
• Kenneth D. Denman, chair of Costco's Audit Committee, a General Partner at Sway Ventures, and lead independent director of Motorola Solutions. Formerly Chief Executive Officer of Emotient, which Apple acquired, and of Openwave Systems.
• Helena B. Foulkes, formerly Chief Executive Officer of Hudson's Bay Company and President of CVS Pharmacy, now Executive Chair of Follett Higher Education Group and a director of Skillsoft and Harry's.
• Sally Jewell, former United States Secretary of the Interior and former Chief Executive Officer of Recreational Equipment Inc, now chair of the board of Symetra Financial.
• Jeffrey S. Raikes, chair of the Nominating and Governance Committee, formerly Chief Executive Officer of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and President of the Business Division at Microsoft.
• Gina M. Raimondo, elected in January 2026, a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, formerly United States Secretary of Commerce and Governor of Rhode Island.
• John W. Stanton, chair of the Compensation Committee, chairman of Trilogy Equity Partners and of the entity that owns the Seattle Mariners, a current director of Microsoft, and formerly founder and Chief Executive Officer of Western Wireless.
• Mary Agnes (Maggie) Wilderotter, a director of DocuSign where she was board chair until January 2026 and briefly interim Chief Executive Officer, a director of Sonoma Biotherapeutics and Tanium, and formerly Chief Executive Officer of Frontier Communications.
• Ron M. Vachris, Chief Executive Officer and President.

Read that as a seller rather than as trivia. If anyone in your network is senior at Berkshire Hathaway, Microsoft, Motorola Solutions, Blackstone, DocuSign, Tanium, Skillsoft, Vail Resorts, Chime, Automattic, Vox Media, Symetra or Follett, a two-hop path to a sitting Costco director exists today. Note also how much technology sits on this board, at a company whose public reputation is cardboard pallets.

Other routes in, and one that does not exist

Acquired-company alumni barely apply. Costco is not an acquisitive company. Its most notable purchase is Innovel Solutions, bought from Transformco in 2020 for one billion dollars and renamed Costco Logistics. That is one alumni pool to work, not a dozen.

There is no public Costco alumni programme. Combined with 94 percent retention, the leaver pool is thin. Treat that as information: the relationships that matter here were built inside the company over many years, so borrow one rather than hunting for a convenient ex-employee.

Your own retail customers. Senior retail technology is a small world. A champion who has watched your product work is a more credible referrer than anyone on your payroll.

And then you have to get to your own connector

This step kills more introductions than the external ask does. Suppose the strongest path runs through one of your own directors who sits on a board with a Costco director. You have to get that person to prioritise it, write something credible, and spend a piece of a relationship built over years, on you. Ask twice in a quarter and you will not be asked a third time. The same applies to a customer champion, who is being asked to lend you their credibility. Most companies have no view of who else internally is already asking the same connector, and two reps approaching the same board member about the same account is common and invisible.

Three rules for the introduction itself

Ask for the function, not the company. "An introduction to whoever owns depot and inventory systems in United States operations" is actionable. "An introduction to Costco" is not. That specificity is what makes a warm referral convert.

Write the paragraph your connector will forward. They will not write your pitch for you, and at a company this cost-conscious the blurb has to lead with what the spend replaces. The forwardable blurb is the whole craft.

A warm path starts the clock, it does not skip it. You still face a buying committee that will ask what it is retiring, and a negotiation run by an organisation that treats cost discipline as a published commitment rather than a tactic. What the warm path buys you is a real conversation, months earlier.

See the warm paths into Costco

Everything above describes the problem: a PO Box instead of a supplier portal. What it does not tell you is which of your own relationships already reaches inside. That is a question about your network, not theirs, and it is the one most teams answer from memory.

Boomerang maps the warm paths your company already has into accounts like Costco, across your team, your customers, your board and investors, and your partners. It then drafts the ask, routes it through the right connector and tracks it to a booked meeting. Book a 15-minute walkthrough and see it run against your own target accounts.