Sam's Club Membership Browser

Purpose

Return the consumer membership tiers Sam's Club currently sells — Club and Plus — along with each tier's standard annual price, current promotional first-year price (when a promo is running), promo window dates, and the full benefits list for each tier. Read-only; never clicks "Join", never enters payment info, never creates an account. The output is a single JSON object listing both tiers and the active promo window (if any).

When to Use

• A research / monitoring agent comparing warehouse-club memberships (Sam's Club vs. Costco vs. BJ's).
• A budget-tracking agent surfacing the user's renewal cost vs. the cheapest current new-member promo.
• A price-tracking agent watching for promo windows ("Save $35 on Club / $65 on Plus" / etc.) and alerting when a new promo opens or the headline savings change.
• Any flow that needs the tier list + benefits without booking. Joining is a separate flow that requires payment + a household member's identity — out of scope here.

Workflow

The https://www.samsclub.com/join page is fully server-rendered: the membership tier names, prices, benefits, and promo copy are all embedded as inline JSON inside the response HTML. An HTTP GET of this single URL is the recommended path — no JS execution, no auth, no cookies, no anti-bot challenge on the HTTP layer. The interactive browser flow does occasionally surface a "Press & Hold" CAPTCHA overlay, but the underlying DOM populates regardless and browse get text body reads cleanly through it — so the browser fallback is still functional, just slower.

1. HTTP fetch (recommended)

GET https://www.samsclub.com/join

No headers required beyond a default User-Agent. Returns ~120 KB of HTML on a 200 status in ≤ 1 s. From any agent runtime that can do outbound HTTPS, plain curl / fetch / requests works. From a Browserbase-only sandbox, use browse cloud fetch "https://www.samsclub.com/join" — --proxies is not required; the URL is not geo-locked or IP-throttled at the HTTP layer.

2. Extract the four numeric prices

The HTML contains two distinct price-bearing JSON blocks per tier. Grep / regex on these exact tokens:

Both the literal <s>…</s> HTML form and the unicode-escaped <s> form appear in the same response (the HTML version in rendered markup, the unicode form inside the JSON-config block). Match either.

Headline promo savings copy:

For a Limited Time: Save $65 on Plus or $35 on Club

→ Save $35 on Club ⇒ Club savings = $35, Save $65 on Plus ⇒ Plus savings = $65. Cross-check that was_price − promo_price equals the headline savings ($60 − $25 = $35, $120 − $55 = $65). If they don't match, the promo has changed since this skill was authored — emit what you found and flag the mismatch in error_reasoning.

3. Extract the benefits list

Each benefit row is rendered inside a benefits-comparison-grid block. Look for repeated objects of the shape:

{
  "benefit": "Free Shipping on Orders Over $50",
  "clubBenefitEligibility": "false",
  "clubBenefitExtraDescription": "...",
  "plusBenefitEligibility": "true",
  "plusBenefitExtraDescription": "Plus members receive free shipping on eligible orders over $50."
}

clubBenefitEligibility / plusBenefitEligibility are stringified booleans ("true"/"false") — parse accordingly. Standard rows observed:

Do not hardcode this table — re-parse from the response each run. New benefits get added (e.g., the Mastercard cashback rates have rotated historically) and Plus-only rows occasionally migrate to all-tier as promotions expire.

4. Promo-window dates

Promo period appears in legal-disclaimer copy like "Must join as a new member between May 14, 2026 and June 15, 2026 …". Extract with a regex over the response body — between ([A-Z][a-z]+ \d{1,2},? \d{4}) and ([A-Z][a-z]+ \d{1,2},? \d{4}). If the promo has expired or no promo block is present, set promo: null in the output and use the standard prices ($50/$110) as the only price quoted per tier.

Browser fallback

Use only when the HTTP path is unavailable (network restrictions in the calling runtime, or the inline JSON shape has changed and a structural re-render is needed for inspection):

sid=$(browse cloud sessions create --keep-alive --verified --proxies \
  | node -e "let s='';process.stdin.on('data',c=>s+=c).on('end',()=>process.stdout.write(JSON.parse(s).id))")
browse open "https://www.samsclub.com/join" --remote --session "$sid"
browse wait load --remote --session "$sid"
browse wait timeout 3000 --remote --session "$sid"
# Don't snapshot — if the Press & Hold overlay is present, snapshot returns
# only 30 a11y refs (all on the overlay). Read the underlying DOM directly:
browse get text body --remote --session "$sid"
# Parse the returned text the same way as step 2 above — the prices,
# benefits table, and promo dates all appear in the rendered text even
# when the CAPTCHA overlay covers them visually.
browse cloud sessions update "$sid" --status REQUEST_RELEASE

Do not click the "Join Plus" / "Join Club" buttons. Do not "Press & Hold" the CAPTCHA — even if it grants navigation, the next page is a payment funnel. Read-only stops at the comparison table.

Site-Specific Gotchas

• Two price-shapes per tier in the same response, and they disagree. The promo "was" price ($60 Club / $120 Plus) does not equal the standard renewal price ($50 Club / $110 Plus). Both numbers are real and both come from Sam's Club's own data. The $50 / $110 figures are the ongoing annual price tagged "price":"$50/year","title":"Club" (and the Plus equivalent) — these are the right numbers to surface as annual_price_usd. The $60 / $120 figures appear only inside the strike-through marketing card and represent Sam's "regular new-member rate" (likely the pre-promo MSRP). When a user asks "what does Sam's Club cost?", report $50 / $110 and call out the $25 / $55 promo as a discount off that, not off the $60 / $120 strike-through.
• Promo dates are in disclaimer text, not in a dedicated field. Sam's doesn't expose promo_start_at / promo_end_at as structured data. The only machine-readable form is the natural-language phrase "Must join as a new member between {start_date} and {end_date}" inside the fine-print block. Date-parse from that.
• "Press & Hold" CAPTCHA appears on the browser path, never on the HTTP path. Verified across two sessions — the first browser session (--verified --proxies) surfaced the "Robot or human?" press-and-hold modal on initial load; the second session loaded clean. The HTTP fetch never sees it. The CAPTCHA overlay is purely cosmetic — the underlying DOM populates fully under it, so browse get text body reads through it. browse snapshot does not — snapshot returns 30 refs all belonging to the overlay itself. Use get text body, get html body, or get markdown body to read through CAPTCHA states.
• browse snapshot returns "Session not found" immediately after browse open on this site. Always interleave browse wait load then browse wait timeout 3000 before the first snapshot/get — the first second after navigation the CDP target is being swapped out from under the browse driver. The autobrowse iter-1 trace shows this clearly: open → snapshot returned -32001 Session with given id not found, but open → wait load → snapshot succeeded on the next turn.
• browse cloud fetch works without --proxies. Sam's Club is not blocking the Browserbase fetch egress, so the residential-proxy round-trip cost is wasted on this URL. Verified two consecutive 200 OK responses, ~118 KB, with Akamai-Grn headers present (so the CDN is in front but is letting the request through).
• Direct curl from the browse.sh sandbox is firewall-blocked. DNS resolution fails (curl: (6) Could not resolve host: www.samsclub.com). The sandbox only allows outbound HTTP via browse cloud fetch (which exits through Browserbase). This is a property of the sandbox, not the site — production agents on normal infra can curl the URL directly.
• The page is geo-personalized but the data we care about is not. Response cookies include assortmentStoreId=<NNNN> and a locDataV3 blob that encodes the inferred user club / city (Atlanta GA or Dallas TX in our two fetches — depends on Browserbase egress IP). Membership prices and benefits do not vary by geography in any of the responses observed. Ignore the geo block.
• No public membership API. The Sam's Club Developer Portal exposes APIs for orders / shoppingcart / location, but does not have a "list membership tiers / prices" endpoint. The inline JSON inside /join is the canonical machine-readable surface for this data.
• Walmart cookies are shared. The response sets AID on .walmart.com and ACID on .samsclub.com — both are the Walmart inc. ad/identity cookies. If you're chaining HTTP fetches to walmart.com in the same session, expect cookie cross-pollination.
• Sam's Mastercard cashback rates are inside the page text and change. As of the converged run: 5% Sam's Cash on gas (first $6,000/yr), 3% dining, 1% other; Club members earn 1% in-club, Plus members earn 3% in-club. These numbers have rotated historically — always re-parse from the response, never hardcode.

Expected Output

{
  "success": true,
  "memberships": [
    {
      "tier": "Club",
      "annual_price_usd": 50,
      "regular_new_member_price_usd": 60,
      "promo_first_year_price_usd": 25,
      "promo_savings_usd": 35,
      "benefits": [
        "Instant Savings — limited-time discounts auto-applied in-club or online",
        "Member Only Fuel Prices",
        "100% Satisfaction Guarantee",
        "Scan & Go (in-app checkout, café orders, fuel)",
        "Two Membership Cards (one household member included)",
        "Free Curbside Pickup on eligible orders",
        "Sam's Club Mastercard® eligibility — 1% back at Sam's Club for Club tier",
        "Bonus Offers — Sam's Cash on dining, shopping & more outside the club"
      ],
      "join_button_label": "Join Club"
    },
    {
      "tier": "Plus",
      "annual_price_usd": 110,
      "regular_new_member_price_usd": 120,
      "promo_first_year_price_usd": 55,
      "promo_savings_usd": 65,
      "best_value": true,
      "benefits": [
        "All Club benefits",
        "2% Sam's Cash™ Back on in-club qualifying purchases (up to $750/year)",
        "Free Shipping on Orders Over $50",
        "Free Delivery from Club on Orders Over $50 (Club tier pays $12)",
        "Early Shopping Hours — up to 1 hour early in-club",
        "Pharmacy Savings — $0 on up to 10 select generic medications",
        "Optical Savings — 40% off second pair",
        "Tire & Battery Center — 50% off installation",
        "Bonus Offers — 20% more Sam's Cash than Club tier",
        "Sam's Club Mastercard® eligibility — 3% back at Sam's Club for Plus tier"
      ],
      "join_button_label": "Join Plus"
    }
  ],
  "active_promo": {
    "headline": "For a Limited Time: Save $65 on Plus or $35 on Club",
    "starts_on": "2026-05-14",
    "ends_on": "2026-06-15",
    "eligibility": "new members only"
  },
  "source_url": "https://www.samsclub.com/join",
  "captured_at": "2026-05-19",
  "error_reasoning": null
}

When no promo is active, set active_promo: null and omit regular_new_member_price_usd / promo_first_year_price_usd / promo_savings_usd from each tier (or set them to null). When parsing fails or the page shape has changed, set success: false and put the failure reason in error_reasoning.