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Walmart Buys Jet For $3 Billion, Hopes To Turbo Charge Ecommerce (venturebeat.com)
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.
It seems to me that it's even better - they set the lowest price, to beat Amazon et al and build market share, but as far as I can tell they actually are paying their partners their regular price. I imagine that the difference is being made up by venture capital. Back to 2000 - we'll make it up in volume!
I base this on the fact that when I have bought stuff through them (because the price is the lowest) I have got an enclosed receipt from whoever actually shipped it with their normal price on it. Now, it may be that Jet gets a discount from that on the backend, but I doubt it's enough to cover all of it.
Sears.com is, bar none, the most crufty and crappy e-commerce site I have ever seen. When you combine that with their high prices and poor customer service, it's a wonder they haven't folded already.
It's especially pathetic when you consider that Sears used to be synonymous with shopping from home in America. They let Montgomery Ward's consume their mail-order business, and then Ward's was consumed by the proliferation of cheaper shop-at-home options; they died off before the web even became a serious force there. They have the shipping lines and the will call facilities to be the name in home shopping, but they don't seem to have the supplier networks any more. Literally everyone else has better prices.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Zero shipping charge but you spend 30+ minutes (minimum) of your time plus gas going to pick it up. It might be cheaper depending on what you are having sent to you but the price isn't zero. Plus you have to actually go to a Walmart which is something I'd actually pay to avoid. My nearest Walmart is about 8 miles away so with my truck I'll spend roughly 3/4 of a gallon of fuel to get there and back. At local fuel prices as I type this (around $2.25) that is about $1.68 per trip in fuel alone for "free" in store pickup. Not even counting the value of my time either. Not bad but not great either. See below.
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.
You are aware that Walmart has their own version of Prime, right? Whether Prime is a good deal depends on how you shop. For me I buy a LOT through Amazon so on a per transaction basis it would be substantially more expensive (not to mention time consuming) for me to go pick something up at Walmart every time I placed an order. I placed 154 orders through Amazon in 2015, so the freight cost per order was $0.65 per order. That's less than the cost of gas to my nearest Walmart and back AND I didn't have to waste my time traveling to Walmart.