Walmart said it had closed Jet.com, only four years after spending $ 3.3 billion to buy online foodstuff startups in an effort to compete with Amazon.
The world’s biggest retailer took Jet.com – founded in Hoboken, New Jersey, by e-commerce pioneer Marc Lore – in 2016 in an effort to improve e-commerce operations, especially in larger metro areas including New York.
But despite its purple logo and unique advertising aimed at millennials, Jet.com has been heading south for more than a year when its employees were moved to work on the Walmart.com website in June and president Simon Belsham resigned amid a decline in sales.
However, Lore is now chief executive of Walmart’s e-commerce business in the US, which posted a 74 percent increase in sales in the last quarter, the company said on Tuesday.
“Because of the continued strength of the Walmart.com brand, the company will discontinue Jet.com,” Walmart said in its revenue report, adding that Jet.com had “been important to accelerate our omni strategy.”
The Jet.com site is still operational and Walmart does not provide a deadline for when it will stop it.
“Walmart ending the Jet.com experiment is no surprise,” said retail consultant and former Amazon executive Brittain Ladd. “I have always believed that Walmart acquired Jet.com to utilize Marc Lore and his team to help accelerate e-commerce adoption at Walmart.
Ladd added that “Walmart has improved their e-commerce capabilities, but Amazon dominates Walmart in e-commerce and will continue to do so.”
