America's Largest Online Retailers

In a bid to improve its position in the ever-growing e-commerce market, Walmart announced today that it agreed to acquire Jet.com for approximately $3 billion in cash. Jet.com is a relatively young e-commerce startup that made a name for itself with an innovative pricing scheme that allows customers to reduce prices by, for example, ordering items from the same distribution center or by forgoing the ability to return items for free.

Walmart and other big-box retailers have struggled to break Amazon’s stranglehold on online retail in the United States, where the market leader’s internet sales exceeded the aggregate sales of its nine largest competitors in 2015. According to estimates by Internet Retailer, a leading provider of e-commerce market intelligence, Amazon’s U.S. e-commerce sales amounted to $92.4 billion in 2015. Walmart generated $13.7 billion in online revenue last year.