Jet.com

» see jet.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

jet.com sits in the part of us e-commerce history i can read about but never had any reason to log into. it was a five-year american brand bracketed by a 2015 launch and a 2020 shutdown, owned by walmart for most of that span, and even at peak it shipped to us addresses only. for a turkish customer it has always been a wikipedia article and a couple of cnbc shutdown headlines.

marc lore had already sold diapers.com to amazon for about half a billion dollars in 2010 by the time he started jet in 2014. lore had two cofounders from the diapers.com team. their thesis was that a smart pricing engine could undercut amazon by recombining shipping discounts in real time as you filled the cart. the public site went up on july 21, 2015. the venture money came in fast, with about 820 million dollars across four rounds and a 1.3 billion dollar valuation by may 2016.

walmart announced the 3.3 billion dollar acquisition on august 8, 2016, just over a year after the public launch. the math was openly about lore. doug mcmillon paid for an executive who could turn walmart into an actual e-commerce company, and the price tag came with a multi-year stock vest tied to lore staying in seat. lore became head of walmart us e-commerce on the day the deal closed in september. by 2018 the jet brand was already deprioritized in favor of walmart.com itself, and on may 19, 2020 walmart announced that the lights were going off in two weeks.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

the original jet pitch was a paid-membership amazon at fifty dollars a year, with a promise of prices below amazon prime. that lasted about three months in 2015 before the company quietly killed the membership and turned the site into an open marketplace. the membership was scaring off the only customers willing to try a new site. the real-time pricing thing stayed: the cart would drop prices downward as you added items the warehouse could ship together, which is a clever idea that almost no other shopping site has copied since.

~ how it actually ended ~

the jet acquisition is widely considered one of the most successful tech deals walmart ever did, and the product itself is dead. axios called it 'arguably the most successful acquisition ever' by a retailer. the entity that walmart actually bought was lore. the website was a side dish. its 4.5 million-product catalog migrated into walmart.com, the urban-millennial brand voice was buried under standard walmart yellow, and the analyst class declared it a win. that is the kind of result you can only narrate after the fact.

~ what got buried with it ~

the millennial-targeted standalone retail brand died with jet, and walmart never really tried to launch one again. for a couple of years the prevailing wisdom had been that walmart needed an upmarket sibling to attack the urban consumer who would not be caught dead carrying a walmart bag. by 2020 that whole thesis was set aside, since walmart.com had quietly become a giant marketplace through sheer scale instead. lore left walmart in 2021 to start a never-quite-realized smart-city venture in nevada called telosa, which is its own kind of obituary.

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