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Walmart says it will discontinue Jet

techcrunch.com

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Re: Walmart says it will discontinue Jet

#171

Post by jm4 »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #152
bitexploder wrote: post #142

I now trust Walmart [jet.com] and Bestbuy more than Amazon. Walmart / Jet have made great strides in their online experience and I trust them more than Amazon now. I don't really care about the branding Jet or Walmart is fine. And for my rant/last straw with Amazon: My most recent Amazon frustration: I ordered a Ryzen processor "shipped and sold by Amazon" and got an opened and obviously installed processor. Pins wer…

I was with you on walmart for awhile but now they're doing the same marketplace bullshit that amazon is doing and all expectations of quality and authenticity are lost again. If I want something used I'll go to ebay and if I want something drop-shipped from china I can go to aliexpress myself. So now I'm using Target.com whenever possible. It's often cheaper than amazon anyway. I actually started using walmart.com ov…

The marketplace is the reason I don’t use Walmart. The marketplace and commingled stock is Amazon’s biggest problem and Walmart appears to be playing catch-up rather than forging their own path. We don’t need another Amazon. I’ve been using Target, eBay, Best Buy and random sites lately. The Target experience is great even if they don’t have the same selection Amazon does.

Re: Walmart says it will discontinue Jet

#173

Post by tfehring »

nojito wrote: post #159
choward wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they do have 3rd party sellers which is the main reason I won't use them.

It’s simply a toggle on the we page to hide all of them.

The same is true of Amazon, but in Amazon's case it doesn't make a difference because of inventory commingling. It looks like Walmart just launched its third-party fulfillment service a few months ago [0], but if they don't explicitly commit to not commingling inventory with third-party sellers, they'll have all the same issues as Amazon.

[0] https://www.supplychaindive.com/news/walmart-ecommerce-fulfi...

Re: Walmart says it will discontinue Jet

#174

Post by thrwywmt »

Walmart bought Jet for two reasons

(1) Walmart's Global eCommerce big re-write was an expensive mess. About a billion over budget and two three years behind timeline promises. There was leadership churn and they needed a new CEO of that business unit - Marc Lore made sense. Prior to Lore the CEOs (and CTO for that matter) were not technical at all.

(2) They wanted to make some changes that would make the eCommerce business unprofitable for a long time - something shareholders would not be happy about. Buying a business and allowing Marc Lore to make those decisions was, in a way, some nice sleight of hand.

The acquisition blindsided the eCommerce CTO. DD was done out of Bentonville and was rumored to be partially done by a SVP at Google.

The tensions between the profitable brick-and-mortar business and eCommerce _grew_ after the Jet.com acquisition. It ultimately led to Greg Foran resigning in protest to how much money was being tipped down the drain trying to compete with Amazon (that is massively subsidized by AWS).

Walmart make their fair share of mistakes. They have had periods of incompetence at scale in some areas. But they aren't afraid of making tough and interesting decisions. That I can respect. If you think running or working for a startup is hard, try thinking through re-orgs and strategic re-alignments at the scale of Walmart.

Re: Walmart says it will discontinue Jet

#175

Post by kevstev »

ryanianian wrote: post #126
archeantus wrote: post #76

I’ve always looked at the Jet deal as $3b to get their CEO Marc Lore to get in there and fix their e-commerce operations. If you look at the online sales performance since Lore joined, as well as the stock price (it has more than doubled), I think $3b was a good deal.

At the time of the takeover, Jet was doing pretty innovative tech while walmart had a very terrible ecommerce offering. Jet used to have this thing where they would offer you live-calculated discounts on items that were in the same FC as items already in your cart since those items would cost them less to ship. It was kinda gimmicky, but it sure was a cool tech demo. I strongly believe that Jet was a longer-term acqu…

That timing coincided with two pretty big unrelated things. Walmart had been rebuilding their backend systems on this monolithic system called Pangaea that was several years late and drained most of the resources of the engineering org during that period. They finally started emerging from the hole around the end of 2016 and could actually focus on the customer and building the business.

Walmart Grocery had just started taking off. By 2017 it had become a 10 figure business- and by some analysis it was concluded that online grocery sales only eat away at in-store grocery sales by a tiny amount, so this was wholly attributed to e-commerce.

And then there was the direct bolt-on of Jet's revenue streams into the e-commerce results of Walmart as a whole, as well as a lot of other acquisitions. I am not saying Lore didn't have a hand in their growth, but the stage was set well for him.

Re: Walmart says it will discontinue Jet

#176

Post by coldpie »

v77 wrote: post #155
bitexploder wrote: post #142

I now trust Walmart [jet.com] and Bestbuy more than Amazon. Walmart / Jet have made great strides in their online experience and I trust them more than Amazon now. I don't really care about the branding Jet or Walmart is fine. And for my rant/last straw with Amazon: My most recent Amazon frustration: I ordered a Ryzen processor "shipped and sold by Amazon" and got an opened and obviously installed processor. Pins wer…

This should be Walmart's lane: no third-party sellers, just the best place to buy branded, verified products.

There has to be _someone_ who wants to be the high-quality seller. Even Newegg went down the eBay path. I understand it's profitable, but surely being a very successful #2 is OK too?

Re: Walmart says it will discontinue Jet

#177

Post by thrwywmt »

nojito wrote: post #36

Pretty sure Walmart has absorbed and replicated jet's backend throughout its (Walmart’s) entire backend. Interesting talk from Scott Havens here about why WalMart acquired them and what Walmart problems they were able to solve. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FskIb9SariI There simply isn't a need for jet.com branding anymore.

Mostly the other way around. Walmart's logistics gets products to consumers a lot cheaper than Jet's did.

Re: Walmart says it will discontinue Jet

#178

Post by drunkpotato »

liamcardenas wrote: post #145
vsskanth wrote: post #60

Story time! When Jet.com launched they had some promos going on so I wanted to check out what it was all about and ordered a bunch of stuff. I think at that point they had 2 day shipping over 25 without a membership. Their signature purple package arrives on time, in a larger than expected box. I open it, and there's a smaller Amazon box inside. I open THAT and it has all my items. I got two receipts, one from jet.co…

This is indeed poetic. It’s actually an excellent metaphor for how AWS works. Fun fact: Startups spend almost 40 cents of every VC dollar on Google, Facebook, and Amazon. [1] [1] https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/socialcapital-annual-lett...

No doubt this is not an original thought, just tickled me to have an urban dictionary style definition. STARTUP (n.): An invention to funnel investor money from venture capital (VC) to Amazon, Google, and Facebook. Exhaust products are hype, blog posts, and waste heat.

Re: Walmart says it will discontinue Jet

#179

Post by speedgoose »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #169
speedgoose wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original comment isn't about the value of the brand according to Forbes, but the strength of the brand. I just say that the brand is strong only in USA but not so much outside. Not many people care about or even know the brand in most countries. So it's not a lot of strength worldwide even though it's valuable in Forbes and very strong in USA. Coca-Cola or Apple are much more strong worldwide.

Oh you named 2 stronger international brands. Obviously jet.com should have been kept then. Way to completely miss the forest for the trees.

Sorry I didn't want to upset you.

Re: Walmart says it will discontinue Jet

#180

Post by duxup »

bitexploder wrote: post #142

I now trust Walmart [jet.com] and Bestbuy more than Amazon. Walmart / Jet have made great strides in their online experience and I trust them more than Amazon now. I don't really care about the branding Jet or Walmart is fine. And for my rant/last straw with Amazon: My most recent Amazon frustration: I ordered a Ryzen processor "shipped and sold by Amazon" and got an opened and obviously installed processor. Pins wer…

I ordered two items from Amazon recently.

Both got in this weird state where the tracking showed they were shipped. Great, then they both hit this location where they were "delayed". I got a notice about that.

Then Amazon has this weird status where Amazon says "You can request a replacement or refund in X days." then it says something about "It might be lost." And it stays in that state for days ... But only if you check app do you see any of this additional status do you know any of this.

Otherwise for all I know this stuff would just sit in that state forever, they keep my money, and just roll on...

I had yet another shipment that entered the same state but obviously had NEVER been shipped, there was no tracking, the tracking number was generated but it was never picked up. It also entered the same limbo state where Amazon doesn't tell me anything, but hey they took my money so I guess they don't care.

Having said all that I'm less interested in Amazon BECAUSE their site seems more like Walmart every day. Pushing items that are a dollar cheaper but clearly garbage quality.

At this point I'm just hitting up Target and other random online retailers to compare / use more often.

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