Did Walmart Waste $3.3 Billion on Jet.com?
Walmart (NYSE: WMT) was criticized for spending $3.3 billion on Jet.com in 2016 because it was an unprofitable and unproven e-commerce site, though many believed the true purpose was to get the brains behind the business, Marc Lore, the e-commerce wunderkind who sold his online diaper business to Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) for $545 million.
But now, just over three years later -- and following a period of dramatic upheaval in the retailer's e-commerce division in 2019, as well as its U.S. business as a whole -- it seems the critics were right:
All of the reshuffling is taking a toll, and traffic to the Jet.com website is dwindling to almost nothing. Data from website analytics firm SimilarWeb shows that during the frenzy of the Christmas shopping season this past December, the Jet website attracted just 1.4 million visitors, a tiny fraction of what it used to see at its height.
Source Fool.com
