It looks like Walmart might buy Jet.com

walmart-buying-jet

The Wall Street Journal has reported that Walmart is in talks to buy Jet.com, the innovative online retailer that decided to go head-to-head with Amazon about a year ago. Since launch Jet.com has gone through a number of pivots from getting rid of their yearly membership fee (an idea they got from Costco) to stopping a practice of buying products from other sites and selling at a loss.

Jet came out of the gate firing on all cylinders with a bold mission and some hilarious commercials like the one below:

Jet.com is currently said to be valued at $1.35B and I don’t think it was their intention to sell the company a year after starting it. The founder of Jet, Marc Lore is one of the biggest heavy hitters in the eCommerce world and is most-well known as the founder of Quidsi (parent company to Soap.com and Diapers.com) which sold to Amazon for $500M.

News of the acquisition has sent shockwaves through the eCommerce world as this doesn’t jibe with the messaging and plans Marc layed out previously. In an interview with Inc.com Marc was quoted as saying:

“I don’t even think about Amazon on a day-to-day basis,” he said. “I basically see an opportunity to create a really large business over time in an online ecommerce market that’s $3 billion today but growing to a trillion dollars over the next 10 years.” (Source – Inc.com)

Of course this might have been in the cards since the beginning since it’s hard to know what the real game-plan is for a company of this magnitude. That being said, I think most of us expected to see Jet take on Amazon for years to come, now it looks like Walmart might take-over which could really shake things up.

What do you think? Was Jet.com planning on making a move like this the whole time or is there trouble in paradise? Comment and let your voice be heard!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton