Walmart Relaunches E-Commerce Site Jet.com With Urban, Big City Focus

Walmart has struggled to keep up with the Joneses in recent years, as e-commerce giant Amazon has taken over as the retailer of choice for many United States customers. One of the brick-and-mortar company’s main efforts to keep up involved Jet.com, an online retailer Walmart wanted to use to compete with Amazon. On Thursday, Walmart rebooted Jet.com with more of a focus on customers in major metropolitan areas, the company announced.

Jet’s new “humanized shopping experience” will roll out first in New York City, a major market that is otherwise not served by Walmart. The new version of Jet will be localized depending on where shoppers live, so someone who goes to the site in New York City will be treated to an image of the Manhattan skyline.

That localization feature will also affect what products are featured on the site. Individual shoppers will also get personalized item recommendations and can now use Siri on iOS to shop using their voices.

Aside from that, the new version of Jet will feature same-day, three-hour grocery delivery, in another direct attempt to compete with Amazon in places like New York. According to the press release, customers will be able to get “iconic New York-based brands” and even craft beer from Jet in the Big Apple.

The last of Jet’s announcement revealed a new partnership with Nike. Jet’s press release is a bit vague about what this actually means other than Nike products will be sold on the site, but it did call it a “curated and consumer-centric experience.”

Walmart acquired Jet in 2016 for $3.3 billion as a way to bolster its online shopping operations. The move seemed to work out for the first year after the acquisition, as Walmart saw large amounts of growth in e-commerce sales after merging with Jet. However, Jet experienced slowed growth during the all-important holiday season last year thanks to errors at its fulfillment centers. Walmart’s new vision for Jet may have risen from last winter’s disappointment.