Facebook/Jet
- Jet.com employees are moving to Walmart.com, and Jet president Simon Belsham will be stepping down in August, Walmart e-commerce CEO Marc Lore wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.
- "Jet continues to be a very valuable brand to us, and it is playing a specific role in helping Walmart reach urban customers," Lore said.
Walmart is overhauling Jet.com.
The company is moving all Jet employees to Walmart.com, and in the process, Jet president Simon Belsham will be stepping down, Walmart e-commerce CEO Marc Lore wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.
"Jet continues to be a very valuable brand to us, and it is playing a specific role in helping Walmart reach urban customers," Lore, who also founded Jet.com, said in the post. "The focus has largely been on NY so far, and we’re looking at other cities where we might bring together Jet’s expertise and the scale and operating model of Walmart. More to come on that."
Belsham will remain at the company through early August, Lore said. There will be no layoffs and the Jet headquarters in Hoboken, New Jersey, will stay, a Walmart spokesperson told CNBC.
Walmart purchased Jet in 2016 in a $3.3 billion deal. It happened just as Walmart was beefing up its e-commerce initiatives to better do combat with Amazon.
A year later, in 2017, Jet refocused its business on serving urban millennials in cities where Walmart did not have a huge presence, like New York.
Read more: How Walmart turned its $3.3 billion acquisition of Jet.com into its greatest weapon against Amazon
That allowed the brand to exist as a way to reach those customers without cannibalizing sales on Walmart.com, which was — and still is — seeing explosive growth.
At the time, Jet’s then-president, Liza Landsman, told Business Insider that Walmart felt it was important to "let Jet be Jet."
Times have changed, as Jet’s sales and traffic dropped by 60% in March 2018 when compared to the year prior, according to a report from Bloomberg last year.
In late 2018, Jet relaunched its website, partnering with sought-after brands like Nike, and it unveiled a same-day grocery delivery program in the New York City area, powered by a warehouse in the Bronx.
"Really the whole new site and business relaunch is just the beginning really of our direction for Jet and broader than that how we’re thinking about the future of where we want to take retail and e-commerce," Belsham told Business Insider at the time.
"E-commerce today isn’t going to be e-commerce in the future, and this is the start of how Jet can fit into that."
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Source: Business Insider – hpeterson@businessinsider.com (Hayley Peterson)