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Walmart Buys Jet For $3 Billion, Hopes To Turbo Charge Ecommerce (venturebeat.com)

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the big-shark,-small-shark dept.

Walmart says it has agreed to acquire online retailer Jet.com for $3 billion in cash. As a promise, Jet.com says it will deliver cheaper prices on a range of goods by encouraging users to buy more items at the same time or to purchase products located in the same distribution center -- thereby cutting collection and shipping costs. ZDNet reports:Overall, it's clear that Wal-Mart has Amazon envy and needs to scale its e-commerce operations. The Jet management team has had experience battling Amazon through Quidsi and its brands such as Diapers.com. As for the deal, Wal-Mart said some of the $3 billion for Jet will be paid over time and $300 million of Wal-Mart shares will also be part of the transaction over time.

3 of 98 comments (clear)

  1. Turbo Charge? by luis_a_espinal · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Walmart doesn't need to turbo charge its commerce site. It needs to rewrite it? Have you tried searching for something in its online catalog? It's like a trip to Altavista circa 1995.

  2. I've tried Walmart's ecommerce... by QuietLagoon · · Score: 2, Insightful
    The prices were usually quite good. What I liked was the ability to ship to to a local store (5 miles away) and pick it up there for zero shipping charge. Usually the pickup was next day, occasionally it was two day. My first order was same day, about 5 hours after I placed the order, it was ready for pickup. All for no shipping cost.

    .
    That's so much better than Amazon's having to wait three days to a week before it is even shipped if you opt for free delivery. (I'm not talking about amazon prime's free shipping, I don't pay $100 per year for free shipping when the product price already has shipping charges baked in. So you amazon prime fanbois don't have to post how great prime is.)

  3. Re:Think that's bad? Try Sears by Solandri · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Sears.com is what you get when a store decides to sell its brand name as a storefront. The vast majority of items on the sears.com site are sold by third party sellers who are paying Sears a commission to appear on their website. eBay has pretty much become the same thing. Newegg does it as well, though they do provide an easy way for you to restrict your search to only Newegg items.

    Most troubling, Amazon is doing this now. You'll notice that sometimes an item on Amazon is listed as "sold by FooBar, fulfilled by Amazon." This is a huge, huge problem. It means FooBar sends their inventory to Amazon who stores it in their warehouse, then Amazon ships it to you when you order it. The problem is, Amazon doesn't keep track of FooBar's inventory - they intermingle it with their regular inventory. If FooBar sends Amazon fake memory cards, that means you can order memory cards from Amazon (not sold by FooBar), and still end up receiving some of FooBar's fake memory cards. It's gotten so bad I've completely stopped buying easily counterfeited items like memory cards from Amazon, and pay a little more to buy them from a local big box store who buys in bulk directly from the manufacturer or a big distributor.