Walmart merges Jet.com into e-commerce business
Walmart has announced it will be re-positioning its Jet.com online business, merging it with Walmart’s e-commerce operations, in order to allow the business to leverage talent on both sides.
As a result of this decision, Jet.com president Simon Belsham will step down in August, with Walmart e-commerce chief executive Marc Lore stating “we don’t have the same need for a dedicated leader [for Jet].”
Moving forward, Jet will be managed by Walmart’s senior vice president of e-commerce retail Kieran Shanahan, who oversees the business’ food, consumables, health and wellness categories.
While Jet’s hyper-focused offering, such as in New York City, allowed the business to create a smarter portfolio of offers, Walmart found that it was still able to get much higher returns through marketing investments in Walmart.com across most of the country.
“Bringing together talent from Jet and Walmart into joint teams has created more opportunities for our business and our people,” Lore said in a company statement.
“We’re now merging the rest of our Jet teams, including Retail, Marketing, Technology, Analytics, Product, and several others within Walmart.”
“Jet continues to be a very valuable brand to us, and it is playing a specific role in helping Walmart reach urban customers.
“The focus has largely been on NY so far, and we’re looking at other cities where we might bring together Jet’s expertise and the scale and operating model of Walmart.”
Walmart purchased Jet in 2016 for approximately US$3 billion in cash, as well as US$300 million in Walmart shares, as a means to combat Amazon.
However, Jet has seen diminishing returns since having been purchased according to Reuters, which posits that while Jet forecasted revenue of US$1 billion in 2016, recent estimates put its 2019 revenue at approximately US$689 million.
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