Since Jet’s launch late July, a lot has been made of the company’s pricing model – both current and future plans. The online retailer has taken on Amazon head to head, even offering direct price comparisons that lead to Amazon product pages. Of course, Jet promises that the real deals come, not from head-to-head competition, but from basket size: “As you shop, see savings grow every time you add items to your cart.”
That would be fantastic, if Jet offered the kind of assortment that lent itself to large baskets, which it simply does not. Here is a recent comparison of a random list of items, some timely for back to school and some chosen based on my own often truly random shopping list:
Search TermAmazon Search ResultsJet Search Results
“Protractor”1,79314
“Graph paper notebook”62823
“Granola bar”9,058160
“Dog toy for large dog”33,583158
“Twin comforter XL”104,7721
(Searches conducted Friday, August 7, 2015 at 1pm MT)
You could argue that either retailer is padding its results with irrelevant products, but even if that’s true, the odds of a shopper finding her full list on Amazon are much greater than on Jet. And that’s bad for Jet, which is positioning a significant portion of its value proposition on a buy more/save more model.
Jet is a new retailer, and no one can reasonably expect the company to launch with an assortment remotely comparable to Amazon, which not only has been building its own assortment for years, but has a vast and robust marketplace of vendors to add in to the mix. Unfortunately, Jet’s assortment issues are much deeper than just the number of products it carries. It also falls down in providing detailed product information about the products it does sell.
The more information a retailer can provide about a product, the more likely that retailer is to help that product sell. There is an upper limit to that rule of thumb – an electronics retailer in France started out selling TVs online with completely irrelevant minutiae from the manufacturer about parts and components that most TV buyers don’t understand. The retailer ended up taking all that detail off and focusing on only the things that shoppers care about – things like contrast ratios and refresh rates – because the more information the company offered, the more confused consumers got and the more it slowed down the sale.
But in general, you need a certain minimum of product information in order to be credible online, and the more you can supplement or expand that information, the better off you’ll be – especially if you stay focused on the information that is important to consumers.
Again, Jet is a new retailer, and Amazon is much more mature. Amazon has a very robust community of customers, many who have literally shopped the site for over a decade. The company uses that information relentlessly throughout the site – from the home page, to product categories, to search results to product detail pages. Personalized product recommendations, smart search terms, product ratings and reviews are all tools in Amazon’s toolbox for converting a browser into a buyer.
Amazon's smart search results reflect years of insights into shopper behavior.

Amazon’s smart search results reflect years of insights into shopper behavior.
Jet is not going to overcome this level of maturity and insight overnight. And it certainly won’t accumulate 44 customer reviews of a school protractor any time soon (by the way, if you have time to kill, a few of those protractor reviews are actually quite funny).
So if Jet can’t compete on the number of products it carries, and it can’t compete on the community and personalization aspects of the products it carries, then it surely must compensate by offering as much relevant product information – even if it’s only what they can get from manufacturers – as they possibly can.
Alas, no.
Let’s take the granola bar example above. Here is Jet’s product detail page for a 48-count pack of Nutrigrain breakfast bars, right alongside Amazon’s for the exact same product (in fact, Jet links to this page from their own product detail page for price comparison purposes). And in Amazon’s case, I cut out all of the community- or personalization-based information like reviews, and products cross-selling or recommendations:
Even with community-generated content taken out, Amazon provides more product information than Jet.
Even with community-generated content taken out, Amazon provides more product information than Jet.
Amazon has a lot more information on the page, but the biggest difference of all is one that is not so easily visible here – it is additional product images. Jet has none. Amazon has two, and for a grocery purchase, they are sometimes more important than the image of the box itself:
Amazon provides images of box labels - critical to grocery shoppers.
Amazon provides images of box labels – critical to grocery shoppers.
Sure, consumers are price sensitive today. But they are also increasingly gluten-free-sensitive, and carb-sensitive, and peanut-free-sensitive – and none of those details are available in Jet’s product details. You might have to zoom in close or squint a little bit, but they are very much there for Amazon.
I don’t think consumers truly expect Jet to win on price against Amazon every time. And I don’t know that an item-by-item price comparison really shows Jet to its best advantage, given that the best savings are to be had by building a large basket. But I do know that if consumers can’t complete their basket with Jet because the assortment is too small or the product they want is out of stock, then they won’t get all the savings that Jet promotes and they will have to take at least some of their shopping elsewhere. If Jet wants to build loyalty and stickiness with shoppers, the company will have to fix that issue very quickly.
But ultimately, the real downfall is in product details, because manufacturers increasingly have all of this information in a format that is relatively easy to pass along to a retailer. Jet has a real opportunity, precisely because it is so new, to take that information in and use it in innovative ways to sell the products it does carry – and the company is not doing that today. Product information helps sell products. It doesn’t matter how good the price is if the consumer can’t buy with confidence. And if the consumer can’t complete her shopping objectives after a couple of tries, she’ll go back to someone who can.