E-Commerce 's Jet.com Gives Back to the Community

Steve Adubato goes one-on-one with Jet.com's President, Liza Landsman, about the ways the e-commerce company is giving back to the community by helping provide diapers to low-income families across the US.

6/8/17 #2046

 

 

 

 

Excerpt:

"We are pleased to welcome Liza Landsman, who is President of Jet.com. How you doing? I'm great. Thanks for having me. Tell folks what Jet.com is. Jet.com is an ecommerce site where you can buy everything you already get, but for 8-10% less. Started when? It started... we launched publicly in July of 2015. Because? Because all of the innovation in ecommerce for the last 20 years has been focused on speed and specialty, and we think there are a lot of folks in the country who still care profoundly about price and value. It's interesting. So Wal-Mart's involved here too? Yeah. So launched July 2015, acquired by Wal-Mart in August 2016. So 13 months after launch. So, as I think about this, you know, I mean... commerce, the world of commerce, or retail, changing dramatically. Who are your customers? So our customers are primarily urban. Older millennials. And they are people who are starting families. So it's interesting, people have this sort of image in their mind of what millennials look like, but more babies being born to millennials in this country than any other generation. So they are the folks with a lot of buying power, and they're digital natives, so their expectations are a bit different. Talk about your pricing model. It matters? It does matter. And it's interesting, we have a dynamic pricing model, but it is powered by something, and you should prepare to fan yourself, cause I'm about to say something incredibly sexy. Which is supply chain reengineering. Supply... [laughter] Supply chain reengineering? Yeah. I'm... it's... that's hot. I can see it. You're fascinated already. [laughter] So... Could you break that down in English? I will break that down. Before everyone in the studio swoons. So most things in this country that are shipped in ecommerce are shipped by the ones. And if you think about it, there's a lot of cost embedded in shipping one thing to one person at a time. And so Jet was founded, actually, on this belief that there was a better way to do this. Better for retailers and brands, better for consumers, and better for the planet. Because if you can ship more things together over a shorter distance, you actually pull costs out of the shipping and that last mile delivery. And so we have created a dynamic system that looks at everything you have in the basket, and figures out... oh yeah. And figures out how to ship the fewest number of boxes the shortest distance, and when we do that, we reduce the cost to get it to you, and we pass a lot of those savings onto you. Brilliant. Who figured that out? The great mind of Marc Lore, my boss and our founder. Talk about Marc..."