How Jet.com Prepared Walmart for the Coronavirus Pandemic - Adweek

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Key insights:

Walmart got talent and strategy out of the deal and made a name for itself beyond brick and mortar.
Walmart’s attempts to distinguish itself from Amazon have set it up for success in the age of the coronavirus.

In Walmart’s Q1 earnings call this week, the retailer announced U.S. ecommerce sales were up 74% and it was discontinuing ecommerce platform Jet.com “due to continued strength of the Walmart.com brand.”

It marks a turning point in a nearly four-year saga as Walmart focuses on customer needs during a pandemic. But despite the shuttering, Walmart certainly wouldn’t be in the position it is today if it wasn’t for Jet.

When Walmart announced the 2016 acquisition, it said the brands would remain distinct as Jet “[provided] a unique and differentiated customer experience with curated assortment.”

Jet launched in 2015 as what financial news site Money.com described as “a mix of Costco and Amazon Prime,” which sought to distinguish itself from retailers like Amazon and Walmart by offering the lowest prices for consumer goods online.

It started with a $49.99 annual fee, but dropped the membership model three months later. Jet, however, retained an arguably never-before-seen pricing structure in which customers received per-item discounts when they waived the right to return a product, paid with debit cards and/or ordered products that could be shipped from the same warehouse.

A little over a year later, Walmart came calling.

And while Walmart certainly benefited from the deal, the Jet brand had something of an identity crisis. In September 2018, for example, Jet pivoted to urban consumers with a grocery delivery option and a partnership with Nike. Its sister text-to-shop service, Jetblack, debuted a few months earlier with a similar target, skewed toward wealthy city-dwelling moms. Jetblack was discontinued in February.

And now Jet.com, too, has come to the end of the road.

‘Like a rocket’

According to Kyle Rees, a director for research firm Gartner’s marketing practice, pulling the plug does not mean Walmart wasted $3 billion here.

“On the contrary, with the Jet acquisition, Walmart acquired hard-to-find talent and tech that have played a critical role in supporting the surge in ecommerce activity reported by the company,” Rees said. “This very much supports what we’ve seen in our research—that of a company methodically working towards a vision in which it sets a new bar for omnichannel excellence.”

Indeed, Brendan Witcher, vice president and principal analyst at research firm Forrester, said Walmart doesn’t regret buying Jet because it acquired the talent it needed to establish a formidable presence in ecommerce.

“Before Jet, Walmart struggled severely in getting ecommerce going and finding success with ecommerce,” Witcher said. “Post-Jet with [founder] Marc Lore, suddenly ecommerce took off like a rocket. It was the acquisition of talent that turned that around.”

In fact, Walmart itself said the acquisition was “critical to accelerating our omni strategy.”

Additionally, Allen Adamson, founder of marketing firm Metaforce and adjunct professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, said acquisitions are sometimes used as catalysts to “get your own people to move faster” and the internal competition between Walmart and Jet staffers could have forced each team to work harder.

While conceding it was “a hefty price tag for that talent,” Witcher said, “I don’t think they could have done it any other way.”

And, he said, if nothing else, Walmart took a competitor out of the mix.

“There’s nothing wrong with doing that,” Witcher said. “The thing to remember is at the time prior to purchase, Jet.com’s mission was to go after the price-conscious consumer. What they were doing was not even going after Amazon, they were going after Walmart.”

Jet also helped Walmart in terms of strategy, like the acquisition of smaller online-only companies that followed, such as clothing retailers Bonobos, Modcloth and Eloquii.

“I think, again, that was part of that move to understanding what makes for a good ecommerce strategy,” Witcher said.

‘Set up for the pandemic as if they knew it was coming’

And that brings us to this May, when online sales for Walmart are up 74%. Retail analyst Bruce Winder pointed out this has more to do with consumer shopping preferences during Covid-19 than anything else, but analysts say it’s unclear if Walmart would have been otherwise prepared to serve this audience now.