Costco’s same-store sales growth cooled in Q3 amidst weakness in big ticket spending.

For the quarter ending May 7, Canadian comparable store sales were down 1% year-over-year, versus expected growth of 1.3%. In the U.S., they were down 0.1%, versus analyst estimates of 2.4% growth. However, overall net sales for the quarter increased 1.9% to $52.6 billion USD.

In the company’s earnings call, the wholesaler’s CFO Richard Galanti noted that average purchases were down 4.2%, due to weakness in bigger ticket spending, particularly items like home furnishings, jewelry, toys and consumer electronics.

However, Galanti says Costco is getting people in the door for fresh foods, sundries, apparel and outdoor furniture “in a big way,” with foot traffic up 4.8% globally. Gasoline, he added, has been “quite profitable for us.”

From a marketing and advertising standpoint, Galanti notes Costco is “taking advantage of the advertising dollars that are out there,” and says that “we’ve done pretty well despite ourselves but we know we can do a lot better in grabbing some of those dollars.”

Ecommerce was down 9% year-over-year. Galanti stresses that the company can do more online, though it won’t be over-exerting itself in this space. “We don’t have some strategic goal to go from 8% of sales, which is still a $20 billion business, to 16%. In terms of the benefit of buying online and picking up in store and things like that, we, frankly, view that as more costly than it is beneficial.”

Membership fee income for Q3 was $1.44 billion USD, a 6.1% increase. According to Galanti, renewal rates were 92.6% for North America, similar to all-time highs reported from Q2. The wholesaler ended Q3 with 69.1 million paid household members and 124.7 million cardholders, both up approximately 7% versus a year ago.

In Q4, there are nine new Costco openings planned. Costco currently operates 853 warehouses, including 107 in Canada.