
Jet.com Raises $350M, Expects $150M More - kawera
http://recode.net/2015/11/24/jet-lands-350-million-in-funding-with-potential-for-150-million-more/
======
rollback
“Our philosophy at that point was, ‘Customers are never going to be easier or
cheaper to acquire as they are today’ and we, as a small company and board,
said we have to step on the accelerator to build this out,” “We literally bet
the company and went through 12 months of runway in a couple of months because
we thought that the time to own the market was right.”

I'll leave the googling as an exercise for the audience.

~~~
blowski
Interesting quote, but I'll save people the effort - it was Tige Savage from
LivingSocial.

> [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/technology/livingsocial-
> on...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/technology/livingsocial-once-a-
> unicorn-is-losing-its-magic.html?nlid=71377211&_r=0)

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cm2187
I just visited jet.com for the first time and it welcomed me with an
"attention required / Please complete the security check to access jet.com"
captcha. Didn't bother to go further.

Amazon UX 1, jet UX 0.

~~~
junto
That's Cloudflare

~~~
cm2187
No. That's my user experience going on their website.

~~~
junto
I think you meant:

    
    
      Yes agreed, that's Cloudflare. However, I personally feel
      that this gives a negative user experience.
    

No need to be so snarky. I was just pointing out what was causing it.

~~~
cm2187
What I meant is that it is not cloudflare's fault. Cloudflare is only a 3rd
party service provider. Jet is responsible for their own user experience.

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funkyy
This is very unsettling. Sounds like company changed its strategy in middle of
funding rounds. I also see a lot of neutral to negative opinions about it.

Well, we will see, but I cannot say I am optimistic about "startup" rising so
much money offering very little uniqueness. $20 mil funding and completely
unique product - sure, but is this really that unique? Cant Amazon just adjust
their offering within few weeks to kill anything that is unique about Jet?

~~~
throwaway43357
Can't Jet just adjust their offering within a few weeks to match the tried and
true practices that amazon.com - the $314.6 billion company - has developed
over 21 years?

~~~
WalterSear
No.

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zzleeper
> Lore defended the company’s aggressive advertising spending, saying the
> market opportunity is too huge to ignore. The e-commerce market is about
> $300 billion in the U.S., but it still only accounts for somewhere around 10
> percent of all retail transactions, depending upon how you measure it.

Isn't this the exact phrase from the Livingsocial article from a few days ago?

Sure, if you are rushing to a new market (Uber, Airbnb, Ebay) you might get
network externalities from being first.. but this?

~~~
icefox
Eh, for things like diapers where I am getting the same thing from them
amazon, or elsewhere Jet does it cheaper and so they have been getting my $
the last few months. And the other day I ended up putting together a larger
shopping cart of misc items and every single one was cheaper on jet than on
amazon. I have noticed that in the last year I could find things just slightly
cheaper elsewhere than Amazon, but when I factored in the convenience and
shipping cost amazon usually won. So this cart full of stuff that was all
cheaper than amazon was a bit surprising. For the pile of random stuff I seem
to order every month or two I might just be looking to use Jet first in the
future. They don't yet have the breadth of Amazon, but I was surprised at what
they have which is what feels like a ton more than when I checked them out six
months ago. For random disposable staples like diapers, batteries, super glue,
pens, etc I don't have any real loyalty to any one retailer over another, but
once I there I will probably keep re-ordering these for a while so as long as
they are near the cheapest I'll stick around.

Oh and Jet's search works. I started writing up a comparison and grabbed
quaker popped as my random selection choice and how amazon would have more,
but honestly I couldn't get amazon's search to work to prove it so I was
forced to conclude that maybe Jet's limited selection is just as good as
Amazons. :| And if anyone from Jet is listening, can you add pepper flavor?

~~~
javiramos
If the uniqueness is 'being cheaper' than Amazon then this story is not going
to end well. I believe that this is a terrible way to start a business. And I
would bet that they do not have the efficiencies of Amazon's scale so they are
probably riding on super thin margins - there's a lot of catch up to do. But
again, maybe the market is big enough to sustain another player...

~~~
CodeWriter23
"Being cheaper" worked out pretty well for Walmart. Amazon definitely has
scale, and advantages of doing things in-house. Amazon's current problem
though, they have spread themselves too thin, reporting losses a quarter ago,
and AWS appears to be what is carrying them now. They could be ripe for an
aggressive competitor to come in and cut their throat in retail. Do to Amazon
what Amazon did to Borders.

~~~
burger_moon
However Jet is only cheaper because it's VC subsidized. Walmart was cheap
because of their efficiency and vendor contracts (and abysmal employee
conditions that followed). They were profitable from the beginning.

Jet will eventually have to IPO for the investors to liquidate. I feel as a
pure ecommerce store, they're going to have to be profitable or wall street
will tear them up.

~~~
CodeWriter23
Not exactly, here's my comment on why Jet is cheaper.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10631311](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10631311)

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nbevans
Their website wants me to do a Captcha just to see page 1. They appear to be
amateurs quite frankly. If you can't setup Cloudflare for a retail website
then what else can't you setup?

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rockinghigh
> Jet shoppers bought more than $33 million in goods through Jet in October,
> up from around $10 million in August.[...] The company’s marketing head,
> Liza Landsman, said the company will spend, on average, $20 million to $25
> million in marketing each month.

$33M in transactions is probably $5M in gross profit. Yet, they are spending
$25M in marketing? These numbers don't add up at all. They are losing $200M a
year because of marketing alone.

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bksenior
This screams Pets.com

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sremani
I really like Jet's tech stack. I have shopped on jet.com for a while. Online
retail still is not the biggest percentage of the total retail. Jet is in no
shape or form dethroning AMZN. My guess would be they would like to be the
obvious #2 in this space, Bing of Retail if you will and over a period as the
share of Online retail increases in the over all pie, they get to have good
valuation.

~~~
seattle_spring
I'm curious what about their tech stack you like? I don't know much about it,
other than pages are incredibly slow to load on both desktop and mobile, their
checkout process is slow and buggy, and their customer service tools are
wholly lacking.

~~~
icebraining
The backend is a flashy real-time stream of billions of updates written in F#
and running on Azure: [http://hanselminutes.com/494/jetcom-scales-with-azure-
f-and-...](http://hanselminutes.com/494/jetcom-scales-with-azure-f-and-more-
with-rachel-reese)

The frontend is Node.js and Angular, according to their job postings:
[http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/102502/front-end-
devel...](http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/102502/front-end-developer-
jetcom)

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brianstorms
Just visited Jet for the first time. Not sure what the distinguishing factor
is. I guess they hope they can execute well enough to get bought by Amazon, or
if not them, Walmart or someone?

~~~
w1ntermute
Did you read the article?

> Jet’s founder Lore believes his company offers something different: A unique
> discounting structure that rewards shoppers when they put more items in
> their checkout basket. Orders that contain multiple items, ideally located
> in warehouses close to their delivery address, are more efficient and cost
> less to process.​ That allows Jet to pass along those savings to the
> customer.

~~~
mason55
That's hardly a moat. It sounds like a great example of FNAC - feature not a
company.

I'm sure Amazon could implement that in about 15 minutes if they wanted to.

~~~
crucifiction
Amazon already has implemented it both with Amazon Pantry and with Amazon
subscribe and save. Each of them rewards you with discounts that increase as
you add more stuff.

~~~
bjwbell
I use Amazon Pantry and subscribe & save. And honestly it's nice but not a
killer feature.

The trickiest thing is estimating what subscription frequency to use. I barely
even think about optimizing for % discount.

~~~
crucifiction
Right, I think thats why people are baffled at the heavy investment in
jet.com. They pivoted to a neat feature but it is hardly an Amazon-killer type
of feature.

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thewhitetulip
Wow, I tried opening jets.com from Indian IP it doesn't open, using a US IP
the site opens :D

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thewhitetulip
I do not understand why jet.com says content not found, is the company's
website down?

~~~
GigabyteCoin
It's working for me.

In the future, check out
[http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/jet.com](http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/jet.com)

~~~
thewhitetulip
I am in India, and whenever I open jets.com it says NOT FOUND

~~~
Lunar_Lamp
jets.com is a different website to the one in discussion: jet.com :-)

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mrjaeger
I can only imagine what the liquidation preference on a round like this must
be...

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rajacombinator
Bring on the promo codes. :)

