Jet.com president Simon Belsham leaves office as Walmart eliminates role

More than two years after Walmart's acquisition of Jet.com, the discount retailer is taking steps to better integrate the e-commerce platform into its own business.

As part of the changes, Simon Belsham's role as President of Jet will be eliminated and Jet team leaders will now report to Kieran Shanahan, who oversees online divisions of Food, Consumables and Materials. of Walmart's health and well-being.

Walmart, which announced the changes in a blog post on Wednesday night, said it would merge the rest of Jet's teams, including retail, marketing, technology, analytics, products and services. several others, within Walmart.

"We no longer have the same need for a dedicated leader" at Jet, said Marc Lore, the co-founder of Jet.com, who now heads Walmart's eCommerce business in the United States.

Belsham will stay in business until early August to help with the transition, Lore said.

A Walmart spokesman told CNBC that no layoffs were expected as a result of these measures and that Jet would retain its headquarters in Hoboken, New Jersey.

"This natural progression of the integration of an acquisition allows us to fully leverage Walmart's assets for Jet and leverage Jet's talent for Walmart," said Lore.

Since Walmart acquired Jet for approximately $ 3 billion at the end of 2016, it has made a minor integration, for example by combining its supply chain teams to go under Jet.com's co-founder, Nathan Faust. Faust and Lore were both from Quidsi, another start-up co-founded by Lore, sold to Amazon in 2011 for $ 550 million. (Amazon then stopped Quidsi.)

Lore said changes to the supply chain have helped Walmart rapidly increase global ecommerce sales and turn into a free overnight delivery offering.

Jet has already undergone some management upset before. He lost his former president, Liza Landsman, last year. She was appointed to the position after Lore became Walmart's e-commerce manager, but then left to work as a venture capitalist. That's when Belsham intervened.

Meanwhile, Walmart has certainly delayed its marketing efforts for Jet, which focused on millennials, to focus more on Walmart.com's growth. Analysts have criticized the company in the past for not increasing its sales with the speed expected by Jet and for concentrating all its investments on New York.

"We found that we could get a much higher return on our marketing investments with Walmart.com," Lore said in Wednesday's blog. "However, in some of the big cities where Walmart has few or no stores, Jet is increasingly interested in its urban customers … If it allowed Jet to reduce its size in terms of sales, it was allowed to create a smart portfolio approach businesses complement each other. "

As for growth beyond New York, Lore added, "The focus has been on New York so far, and we're looking at other cities where we could bring together the skills of Jet, the model and the Walmart business model. "