This year alone, Amazon has seen its stock value is up more than 50%. Amazon has also announced new technology, acquisitions, and businesses which they are getting involved in to further spread the wings of their enterprise. With that growth and the spread of the company, how do their competitors compete? Walmart is making an attempt to truly compete with their most recent announcement. This past week, Walmart announced that they will be redesigning the Jet.com site, offer faster delivery, and offer other improvements to increase their bottom line.
Jet.com is a digital shopping site Walmart purchased for over $3 billion two years ago. Jet.com has attracted customers in the past due to its “real-time pricing algorithm” which aims to more effectively gauge what a customer is willing to pay for a product using a marginal cost formula. In recent years, traffic to Jet.com has been decreasing, in large part due to the archaic design of the webpage. On the new site, shoppers will no longer see just products. Instead, the products that shoppers will see will be based on personal characteristics. For instance, they will see the items which are available within their area and also get suggestions for items based on their past purchases.
According to Chief Customer Officer David Echegoyen, “Our plan is to be more relevant for what you’re shopping for. Spotify does this really well with the music. It gets better the more you use it. And that’s the same approach we want to take to retail.”
In addition to improving the site, Jet.com will also be offering faster grocery delivery for customers. Currently, Jet.com is not able to offer same day shipping for groceries, but in order to compete with rivals such as Amazon-owned Whole Foods Market and Target, they realized they need to get to that point. To that effect, they will start their one-day delivery process on a trial basis in New York City and expand outward from there. Jet President, Simon Belsham, believes the transition into the same day delivery process will be very feasible for the company as they already have a large scale supply chain and provide groceries at an “Everyday low price.”
Finally, Jet.com is enhancing the products it brings to the table. Nike and Converse came to an agreement with Walmart so that now there will be hundreds of their products on the site. Products will range from apparel and sneakers to workout accessories. Previously, shoppers were able to buy Nike products on the site, but had to do it through a third-party vendor. In the words of Marc Lore, the founder of Jet and the current president and CEO, the expansion into these companies “perfectly complements our overall eCommerce portfolio strategy.”
