Jet.com Sees Sharp Decline in Traffic

Walmart Inc., Jet.com's owner, has increased marketing of its primary website while scaling back promotion for Jet. While the shift may help maintain the retailer’s declining profit margins, the impact has been felt on Jet’s website, where traffic declined about 60 percent in March compared with a year earlier. Walmart.com’s traffic, meanwhile, was up 5 percent over the same period, according to data tracker SimilarWeb. The decline in Jet's traffic comes as Walmart revamps its main website and looks to lure more upscale customers with new apparel brands, expanded home-delivery options and a partnership with department store Lord & Taylor. This could draw even more shoppers away from Jet.

Total Retail's Take: With Jet under Walmart's ownership for over a year at this point, and traffic on the decline, one has wonder what the future holds for the online-only brand. Will it continue to operate as an independent entity, or will it be incorporated into Walmart's e-commerce business? The counterpoint to that is that traffic is just one e-commerce metric, and many would argue not a particularly important one.

“So long as Walmart’s numbers are strong it doesn’t matter what happens to Jet,” said Sucharita Kodali, an analyst at Forrester Research, to Bloomberg. “This makes it easy to sunset Jet and focus on Walmart. I’m not sure, honestly, why Jet is even still around.”