Jet.com launches discount buying site

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imageSerial entrepreneur Marc Lore, who successfully sold his company Quidsi to Amazon in 2010 is now set to take on his old bosses with a new NYC based start-up firm called jet.com.

Lore sold his previous business Quidsi to Amazon in 2010 for $550m and worked there for two years after acquisition. Now he’s launching his new venture next months with a start up staff of 100. He has already raised $80m from investors.

Jet will be a wholsesale priced marketplace offering prices at least 10 to 15% cheaper than elsewhere online. Many of the buyers, it would seem will be sellers on other marketplaces as well as cost conscious consumers. The marketplace will sell clothing, books and electronics and a fee of $49 annually will apply.

Lore says: “The bottom line is, we’re basically not making a dime on any of the transactions. We’re passing it all back to the consumer. We want to build a different type of relationship with the consumer. When we show you a product, it’s not because we are making money on it and not because we are closing out a line. It’s because we think it’s a good deal.”

It will predominantly make money from subscriptions and will also offer a marketplace facility so that third parties can sell using the platform too. And costs will be kept low by encouraging buyers to buy bundles and take time to wait for their orders by pushing slower economy shipping offers. Jet won’t be competing on speed but price.

It looks like an interesting concept although it’s not clear that it will be coming to the UK any time soon although it’s certainly something we’d like to see over here.

8 Responses

  1. Basically.

    10 – 15% is what ebay charge, this is the saving they ask sellers to PASS ON direct to consumers.

    For instance the bulk of my purchases outside food are on one of these 2 sites so say i paid £49.00 per year, to save 10 or 15% on my purchases i need to spend £380 to make that make, and anything i spent over id be saving compared to either ebay or amazon, as long as selling fee were passed on.

    So basically if you are hardcore ebay and amazon addict, this would would out for you as long as there where enough sellers. For the sellers, it would work out as it would cost the same, and as they have mentioned you could swap 1st class for 2nd class and save a bit more.

    Good luck to them is what i say. If they do ok, id be in for one.

  2. The difference is ebid is run by a bunch of people with poor scalability skills and questionable management.

    This guy is a proven success and more importantly he is operating with a ‘startup’ mentality.

    Ebid runs like an ageing dinosaur even though it hasn’t even broken out of start up stage.

    New competition (big or small) for the abusive duopoly (Amazon and eBay) is always good. We should welcome this and hope it is successful.

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