Jet website traffic reached new lows in December with 8 million visits, down from 22 million the year before. That’s a decrease of 63% in a year.
When Jet publicly launched in July 2015, traffic to the website immediately soared, with 6.8 million visits that month followed by 12.2 million in August, according to data from SimilarWeb. Walmart acquired Jet in August 2016, at the time the website was attracting over 20 million visits every month. The shopping site’s traffic peaked at 36 million visits in April 2017, but has been on a decline since.
Jet “relaunched” itself in September last year with a focus on urban markets, new assortment, new partnerships like Nike and the meal kit provider Blue Apron, and new three-hour and next-day delivery options. Jet now positions itself as “the shopping destination for city consumers.” This strategy doesn’t appear to be working, as traffic - and thus also sales - continues to decrease.
When first launched, Jet aimed to directly challenge Amazon, but post Walmart acquisition has been searching for a differentiated vertical. Walmart is all-in on Walmart.com, which has left Jet trying to avoid being a direct competitor to Walmart.com itself.
“We’ve been investing more in Walmart.com on a national basis and reducing marketing investment in Jet, except in certain urban markets.
Jet will go through a period of adjustment and then it’ll start to grow again in the future but focused on specific markets and opportunities, whereas Walmart will be the broad-based, big part of the business, and growing it will be a priority.”– Doug McMillon, President & CEO of Walmart
Without marketing spend, Jet is on target to have the smallest number of visits soon since July 2015 when it first launched. This Christmas, Walmart.com had 440 million visits in December, Target.com had 200 million, BestBuy.com had 178 million, and Macys.com had 103 million visits. Amazon.com led with 2.98 billion visits in December. By comparison, with 8 million visits Jet.com is orders of magnitude smaller, and in no way deserving the comparison to leading retailers.
“We’re sort of positioning Jet to be more geared toward the affluent, higher-income, urban millennial customer,” Marc Lore, Jet’s founder. Well, Jet has sort of become irrelevant in the US online retailer battle. It’s not clear, honestly, why Jet is even still around.
