Jet ditches membership fee

Internet Retailing

13th Oct 2015

Less than three months after the launch of Jet.com, the high profile Amazon competitor, the site has dropped its $US50 annual membership fee.

The abrupt shift in strategy comes weeks before the end of a three-month trial for the first batch of would-be members, who would have had to decide to pay the fee or stop using the site.

The membership fee was designed to provide lower prices on individual products. Customers are also encouraged to place large orders, which would trigger discounts calculated by Jet’s “Smart Cart”.

“When we launched Jet, we envisioned a shopping club that would empower both consumers and retailers by exposing embedded costs and creating new ways to eliminate them,” ,” CEO Marc Lore wrote in a blog post.

“With the average number of units per order twice what we expected, Smart Carts have been the rule, not the exception.

“Our customers are taking every advantage of our dynamic pricing engine to place orders that can be fulfilled at a lower cost — and to have those efficiencies shared with them as savings.”

Lore promised that dropping the membership fee would not impact the ability of customers to save money by placing larger orders via Smart Carts.