CEO and Founder Marc Lore buzzes with excitement as he talks about the kind of traffic his new website has already seen on opening day.
Jet.com, which has raised $225 million to take on Amazon, officially launched Tuesday after welcoming beta testers in April. The site promises to offer prices that are 10-to-15% lower than anywhere else.
“Jet is for people who care about saving money, but don’t want to have to work for it,” Lore tells Business Insider over the phone. “There no coupon clipping or wasting time. It’s about shopping smarter to save. We’ve built this technology that does all the heavy lifting in the background. You just shop as you ordinarily would, and you just see the prices start to get better.”
Products start at about 8% cheaper right-off-the-bat, but the site then offers additional discounts when shoppers can combine multiple orders into a single shipment, waive the ability to return something, or use debit cards instead of credit cards.
Instead of making a profit by taking a cut off the top of product prices, Jet makes money solely from a Costco-esque membership free: Users have to pay $50 a year to shop.
Lore said after doing the morning talk show circuit… “I’m so looking forward to getting back to the office, we were just on Good Morning America, Today Show, CNBC but I want to get back there. The incredible amount of energy in the office right now is amazing.”
