It’s been one year since US-only marketplace Jet.com arrived on the scene. It was based on a different premise: to start with it included a $49 annual subscription and the prices would be at their most competitive when a shopper bought in bulk, bundled up and didn’t require expedited delivery.
The model has changed since launch: they’ve drop the subscription. Jet says that now they already have 4 million shoppers. They launched with an inventory of 10 million products and that’s now up to 12 million. They launched with funding of $225 but with subsequent rounds they have a warchest totalling $565m.
Chief revenue officer Scott Hilton says of the first year: “Because it’s only been our first year, we did a fairly vanilla-flavored ecommerce site. We didn’t put a lot of bells and whistles on the experience. Over the next year we’ll be diving into a more specialty experience by category, just making sure we’ve got all the right attributes and filters. In the automotive space, we don’t have any fitment data for people who are trying to find products for their cars. In automotive, you need fitment data,”
It will be interesting to see how Jet progresses in the next year. At Tamebay we firmly believe that a multitude of diverse marketplaces serving different niches and locales is desirable. At the very least, we’d welcome a third big marketplace. Jet could be that player.
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Still relatively unknown. For local products, shoot for https://coolbuck.com