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Walmart says it will discontinue Jet

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Re: Walmart says it will discontinue Jet

#231

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…

I agree the marketplace stuff sucks. FWIW you can pretty reliably filter the retailer to 'Walmart.com' and only see first-party stuff.

Re: Walmart says it will discontinue Jet

#232
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can filter out non-Walmart sellers from the left side filter on search results.

Re: Walmart says it will discontinue Jet

#234
post #21
post #8

I know it is a simple way to look at it, but Walmart on whole has been a game changer when it came to handling the lockdown. Where Amazon was taking weeks to get "non-critical" items shipped, Walmart had on average a 3 day wait for drive up pick up. They've introduced a yearly fee for delivery and we signed up. It's been top notch. In my area, they outsource the delivery to doordash. Order, pick a time for delivery a…

I don't understand why Walmart doesn't have a customer supplied delivery program. Using the app, you would sign in when you enter the store. It would inform you of any deliveries within X miles of your home. It tells you how much you would be paid in store credit to do those deliveries. So you start shopping with say $33.50 already in your pocket. Then you just drop off a couple of bags at a few houses on your way ho…

I interned at Walmart Technology in 2014. All of the interns had to participate in an innovation challenge, and one of the teams had this very idea. I can only assume that Walmart explored the idea and passed on it.

Re: Walmart says it will discontinue Jet

#235
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.

For anybody looking to skip ahead to the real start of the video, where Scott Havens appears: he comes on at about the 7 minute mark.

Re: Walmart says it will discontinue Jet

#236

As a former Jet employee, this makes me pretty sad. I took the job at Jet because I wanted to learn more about F#, coming from a Haskell background, and I was happy to find that my coworkers were all really smart people and the codebase, while far from perfect, was written using functional concepts, and avoided the "writing C# in F#" trap. I left Jet partly because there had been talks of absorbing Jet into Walmart,…

This is disappointing to hear. When Jet was acquired, I thought a significant motivation (and justification for acquisition price) was to give Walmart access to the Jet’s tech stack. Apparently this was not the case.

I think that's still kind of true; a lot of the infrastructure was lifted or fitted into Walmart's stack, and IIRC the algorithms for the web scraping and indexing team was used.

Disclaimer: The accuracy of this should be taken with a grain of salt, I wasn't involved with any of the decision making.

Re: Walmart says it will discontinue Jet

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

IKEA.

I could name a hundred niche sellers too, but the allure of Walmart and Amazon is that they sell basically everything. I can buy a Macbook and Gatorade plus some brand name AA batteries for my RC car that I bought all in the same shopping trip.

IKEA has good products but they don't come close to general merchandise stores like Amazon or Walmart.

Re: Walmart says it will discontinue Jet

#238
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I have noticed that as well. Newegg is another one that went down the "Market place" approach and is why I didn't list them. I just use Micro center now. A little bit less selection, but not much and they will order almost anything for you and get it quickly.

TigerDirect[1] is a solid alternative to Newegg, that doesn't appear to have succumbed to the easy buck of the marketplace model.

[1] http://www.tigerdirect.com/

Re: Walmart says it will discontinue Jet

#239

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 switched to Walmart after Amazon’s recent knuckle headed moves. Unfortunately, the Walmart app is not as good. Even worse, it connects to the following trackers: doubleclick.net, app-measurement.com, braze.com, googlesyndication.com, google tag services.com. This is shocking and super scary and Walmart needs to get some decent tech talent to fix their junk.

All of those except Braze are just one company: Google.

Re: Walmart says it will discontinue Jet

#240

> “Due to continued strength of the Walmart.com brand, the company will discontinue Jet.com,” the company said in a short statement. “The acquisition of Jet.com nearly four years ago was critical to accelerating our omni strategy.” What a load of corporate bullshit. How does anyone actually write that and live with themselves?

True, but having a 3 letter domain name that sounds fast and a separate checkbook may have actually been important to growing their e-commerce business. The crazy discounts they offered when they first started and the purple boxes all had the effect of signaling to consumers (and investors) “we’re trying something new”, and now they rolled everything they learned (things lots of e-commerce sites are learning all at t…

I was referring more to the first sentence attributing the strength of walmart.com as the reasoning to shutting down jet.com. Walmart isn't shutting down jet.com because of "the continued strength of the Walmart brand", Walmart is shutting down jet.com because jet.com lost $2b last year and failed to gain the success they'd hoped for. The business failed.
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