Jet.com makes a serious play to compete with Amazon

The approach is based on a lower pricing strategy, combined with fast delivery. It’s a major, gutsy play for Jet.com’s founder and CEO, Marc Lore. No one has seriously tried to beat Amazon on price – until now. But if anyone can do it, the founder of Diapers.com, Wag.com and Soap.com can. After successfully building these powerful brands, defined by amazing branding, customer experience and convenience (personalization- reminding me that it’s time to reorder, and making it easy to do so; free 2 day shipping, even on a 40lb bag of dogfood), Lore sold Quidsi brands to Amazon for over $500 million.

So it’s just a little bit epic that he’s going after Amazon now.

The key differentiator for Jet.com is that Lore creates beautiful and engaging customer experiences that create a devoted customer base with loyalty and an emotional connection to his brands. And from that perspective, Jet doesn’t disappoint. The site has a powerful brand identity and a great customer experience. The search is powerful, the sort features are what’s needed, and the selection seems robust. The homepage promises ‘club price savings’, which alludes to Costco as well as Amazon’s prime pantry. Jet is going directly after Amazon on price, showing comparative pricing against Amazon on every item, to demonstrate the savings.

How is Jet.com doing it? They’re sourcing wide and far- and instantly serving up the prices that are lowest based on your location and things that are cheaper to ship together. Jet will show ‘smart savings’ on items that work well together. every time you add to cart, an animated calculator comes up to show you how many items are now cheaper on the site- it has a little bit of a slot machine effect, of making you feel like there’s a reward with every transaction.

There’s a ways to go- Jet is operating at a huge loss currently, as it gets the infrastructure in place to do this efficiently. From a customer perspective, there’s work yet to be done- product descriptions at the thumbnail level don’t always make it clear what the quantity is for the price, so it can be a little confusing. In the shopping cart, I see how much I’ve saved per item, but no subtotal for line items I’ve ordered in multiples. They need to add a quick-view feature to the search display- something Amazon doesn’t have, so could be yet another differentiator.

In the shopping cart, you can save even more if you select certain payment methods, or to waive the ability to have free return shipping. More incentive to checkout. On my $50 purchase, I saved over $9- not bad.

The biggest obstacle for Jet in driving repeat purchases, is that their creative sourcing means that an order ends up shipping in many multiple packages: My order of 8 items will arrive in 5 separate shipments. I’m not paying the added cost- Jet is absorbing that. But as a customer, I don’t like the inconvenience and waste associated with receiving that many packages and keeping track of whether everything has arrived.

Will Jet give Amazon and Walmart a serious run for their money? Maybe. I hope so, because the competition is good- and I  love a site that takes the time and effort to make the customer experience feel like a wonderful place to be. It’s a differentiator that matters- Amazon has never tried to go there, and Walmart failed when they tried- their customer associates a certain over-crowded messiness with savings. It could be the differentiator, combined with price- that makes Jet.com a serious contender.