Shopping News: Walmart buys Jet for $3 billion

We have some meta shopping news! Walmart opened up their wallet and paid $3 billion in cash to buy trendy online shopping service Jet.com. The guy running Jet will take over Walmart’s US operations. Details and discussion of the purchase via Techmeme.

Jet has some interesting ideas in online shopping, for example, a built-in volume discount that adjusts dynamically based on how many units of an item you buy by pressing the “+” and “-” buttons. Volume Discounts are not a new thing, for example Adorama has had them for many years, but Jet made them visual and made the volume discounts bigger.

Jet also introduced something a bit disturbing for non-consumable purchases, you don’t know who the actual seller/fulfiller of a purchase is ahead of time. This may not be an issue if you are buying trash bags or music CDs, but it’s very important when it comes to authorized dealer status and things of that nature. Even for something as small as a memory card this is a big issue since there are quite a few fakes out there.