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Comment by camelNotation | Hacker News Reader

Walmart has something Jet.com needs: one of the world's most advanced product delivery systems. Every Wal-Mart store is a distribution center waiting to happen. They are enormous and they are everywhere.

Jet.com has something Wal-Mart can use to rocket its online presence forward: advanced online infrastructure, patents, a wealth of technology experts, and users.

Together, Wal-Mart can beat Amazon at its own game by doing what Amazon is already doing (building more, smaller DCs everywhere) using what they already have (massive retail locations everywhere).

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Jet also has something else that Walmart doesn't have: a better reputation. It doesn't hurt that Jet's founder also used to work for Amazon as well and he has a track record with founding and running Quidsi (Diapers.com, etc...)

It does have a reputation (for me, anyway) of possibly being cheaper. And tons of reviews online of people having poor experiences buying from it. That's the rep. it has for me so far :)

It does have a cooler looking website than walmart, and possibly even amazon. FWIW.

That's actually what I was discussing. Walmart does have the reputation for being cheap; too cheap at the expense of everything else (parking lot safety is just one example out of many). Market research has shown time and time again that they just can't win certain high income demographics (even after making major changes), which is just another reason that Costco, Target, and Amazon thrive and why I feel that this was a good buy for Walmart.

Cheap with a poor customer experience? They'll fit right in at Walmart.

I hope it works out for them. Amazon's age it's showing, their site it's clunky and unresponsive at times. Sellers misrepresent their wares all the time. They're outright banning some products which, for a store, it's a very opinionated move if you ask me. And don't give me the "the Apple Store doesn't carry the Fire" crap, Amazon bills itself as the "everything store". It works sure and customer service it's still miles ahead the competition (this is expensive and something that it's always overlooked by the competition) but they're neglecting the storefront by trying to be "everything".

Amazon closes customer accounts left right and center too, good luck getting thru to anyone human then despite being a decade long customer with thousands of digital purchases going poof.

Can you give me any pointers on where I can find out more about this?

(Also curious about the banned product lines if anyone can summarize/link to what's going on there.)

Sample product: you can no longer get neodymium magnets from Amazon Shopping. (They were in my Wish List, and then, poof, "This product is no longer available." More searching within the site returned nothing.)

Okay, granted, but that's not exactly what I'd call egregious. They're, um, capable of causing injury, and the kind of thing I would probably want to ensure was only sent to recipients who had a i-know-what-i'm-doing form on file with my legal dept. Not the kind of thing I expect to be available for free 2-day shipping or whatnot.

You can Google "Amazon phone number" to speak to someone human...

I did, they want me to fax credit card details to their fax number (who the hell uses fax in this day and age?) which I done and no reply

I doubt anyone monitors it, everytime I ring them they bounce me from idiot to idiot

I now need access to some invoices for purchases I made last year for accountant but cant login, and of course all my digital purchases are gone, the 2 kindles are useless.

Sounds like parts of this saga are missing. Amazon doesn't just dump customers, they are happy to take everyone's money.

I kinda doubt jet.com is more sophisticated than walmart.com. They just wanted a more youthful brand.

Just about anyone who cares is envious of Walmart's logistics systems. They're seriously life-savers in disaster management scenarios.

jet.com has no:

- reviews of products

- no customer q&a section

- no 3rd party seller ratings

These are rather basic features in an ecommerce site. So no, I don't think the guys from jet.com are experts at all.

Worse than having no content is publicly showing an empty user-generated content section. Marketing-wise it also seems like a dumb idea to try to beat amazon.com on longtail.

Perhaps they intentionally don't have those. I can see them being as much liabilities to a marketplace as a benefit - with significant overhead.

Wal-Mart's delivery system is tuned to service a few thousand stores plus whatever scraps walmart.com takes in. It remains to be seen if they can use Jet to their advantage or destroy it by borgifying their management with Wal-Mart graybeards.

I am a little skeptical on Jet side, experts, patents etc. I think Walmart probably has better experts, but like someone said, this is mostly lead by corporate and I expect this to turn out to be terrible decision. But what do I know :)

WalMart has experts, but they are already busy current problems. To get into online needs experts who spend their time on the problem - but WalMart cannot afford to let their current experts leave their current jobs or the company would go under.

That isn't to say WalMart can't (or shouldn't) transfer some of their experts to Jet, and some Jet experts elsewhere. Just that they cannot afford to lose all their experts in the core business to the online dream.

I too expect this to turn out to be a terrible decision, but I've been proven wrong on my expectations before. Reasons like the above is generally why.

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