Jet.com May Be History, but Walmart Got What it Needed

Jet.com, the fledgling e-commerce site Walmart (NYSE: WMT) acquired in 2016 for $3.3 billion, is being discontinued. Walmart made the announcement in its first-quarter earnings report on Monday.

Back in 2016, the Jet.com acquisition was mostly pooh-poohed by financial observers, and on the surface, it may look like Walmart threw away billions on an upstart website that never reached maturity. However, the reality is that Jet.com and its founder Marc Lore, who now runs Walmart's own e-commerce division, fueled Walmart's own e-commerce growth, making the company No. 2 in e-commerce sales market share, behind only Amazon.

Walmart had also been downplaying Jet for years. In 2018, it shifted much of Jet's marketing budget to Walmart.com, seeing that it got a higher return on investment there; last year it merged what was left of Jet's independent teams in areas like retail, marketing and technology with Walmart's teams. Jetblack, an experiment with a concierge service catering to high-end Manhattan clients, was a money loser, and Walmart pulled the plug on it in February.

Source Fool.com