Freshippo vs. Sam's Club: China's Offline Retail Race for the Same Shopper

China's retail market isn't a story of offline dying under e-commerce pressure. Online sales of goods and services grew 5.2% year-on-year in the first half of 2026, reaching 10,071.5 billion yuan — solid growth, but new-format offline retail is keeping pace, and in some segments outpacing it. Two of the clearest examples are 盒马 / Freshippo (an Alibaba subsidiary) and 山姆会员店 / Sam's Club (Walmart's China arm), and they're competing for the same shopper with two fundamentally different playbooks.

The club that finally beat foreign rivals at their own game

Sam's Club was a niche format in China for years — but 2026 is turning into an inflection point: the chain plans 13 more stores this year, reaching 76 nationwide by year-end. The expansion isn't limited to megacities — it's moving into mid-size cities like Zhangjiagang and Yangzhou, meaning a membership-warehouse model usually associated with suburban big-box stores in the West is finding an audience in China's mid-tier cities, not just Shanghai and Beijing.

The fresh-format supermarket that finally turned a profit

Freshippo, Alibaba's offline-retail showcase, posted its first-ever annual profit in 2026 — and immediately announced an ambitious plan: at least 300 new stores this year, roughly 100 of them across 50 new cities. For scale, Hema Fresh already had 430 locations back in 2024, surpassing Walmart's China store count. Freshippo's core mechanic isn't just grocery retail — it's a logistics node: orders within a 3 km radius are fulfilled in 30 minutes, with each store doubling as both a storefront and a mini-warehouse for online orders.

What this means for anyone studying China's retail market

Both players are growing fastest not in tier-1 megacities but in Tier 3 cities — a segment projected to grow at a 10.88% CAGR through 2031, outpacing major metros. Meanwhile small-format outlets already hold 81.35% of China's retail market share, while warehouse-club formats like Sam's Club are growing even faster, at a 13.92% CAGR. The future of China's offline retail isn't one winning format — it's several parallel models, each finding its own city and its own shopper.

For anyone studying China's retail and logistics landscape, the gap between Freshippo and Sam's Club is the gap between "store as a delivery warehouse" and "store as a fixed-ticket wholesale club" — and both models can be seen firsthand on our China retail and instant-delivery expedition, with visits to Alibaba and Sam's Club.

Takeaway

Offline retail in China isn't retreating in the face of e-commerce — it's turning into logistics infrastructure. Freshippo is testing the profitability of the "store as warehouse" model, while Sam's Club is proving membership retail works well beyond megacities. For Russian businesses studying the Chinese market, that's a reason to look past online sales figures alone and watch how physical retail is being rebuilt around last-mile logistics.