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Costco shut down Costco Next at the end of August without telling members, vendors or the press. Storefront links now land on a customer service page listing vendor phone numbers for returns and warranty questions. Fast Company reported Costco did not respond to a request for comment, and neither did anyone else who asked.

The program ran from 2017 as a referral marketplace, roughly 80 partner brands at the end, discounts reaching 40% on categories the warehouses never stocked. Anker chargers, Briggs & Riley luggage, Priority Bicycles, Gorilla Shed, Cangshan knives. Members verified their membership, clicked through and bought on the vendor's own site.

That last detail is the one most of the coverage is getting wrong. Costco's own FAQ, live for years before the shutdown, said the supplier handles shipping, customer service and returns. Next purchases did not earn Executive 2% rewards either. Members never had Costco's return guarantee on these orders. The vendor phone list on that customer service page is not a downgrade from what existed last month.

Which tells you why this was easy to kill. Costco carried no inventory, no fulfillment cost and no returns liability on Next. It was a membership perk and a lead-generation channel for suppliers. Programs structured that way have almost no exit cost, and that is exactly how this one exited.

The growth commentary has aged badly. On the May 29, 2025 earnings call, Gary Millerchip told analysts that Q3 fiscal 2025 sales on Next matched the program's entire fiscal 2022 total, and pointed at a pipeline of new vendors. Costco has never disclosed a dollar figure for Next in any filing. A percentage off an undisclosed base is not a data point, it is a mood. Fifteen months later the mood is gone and we still do not know the number.

What Costco does disclose keeps climbing. In fiscal Q3 2026 the company reported online and app visits up 37% and digitally enabled sales up 21.5%. If the e-commerce business is compounding at that rate, a referral program that sends members off-platform to buy from someone else starts to look like leakage rather than assortment. Every Next click was a member leaving Costco's checkout, its data and its ad surface.

My read is that Costco Next was built for a version of the company that could not serve those categories itself, and Costco has spent the last four years becoming a company that can. The quiet part is what it says about member communication. A program with 80 brands and a decade of history disappeared with no email, and the vendors found out alongside the customers.

Costco reports earnings on September 24. Nobody will ask about this, because Next was never big enough to move a line item. That is the point.

Enrique Lores has run PayPal for a little over six months, and he has decided to keep it independent. Stripe and Advent International offered about $60.50 a share this summer. The talks stalled on price. Shares touched $62 and have since fallen to $53.

His pay deal shows what the board thinks is possible. $25M if the stock averages above $68 for 60 days, north of $60M at $125. Venmo's younger, wealthier user base may not settle that question.