Jet seen giving Walmart small lift

It may be too late for Walmart to ever catch up with Amazon online — but buying Jet.com could at least give the retail behemoth a leg up on rival Target.

Seattle-based Amazon now accounts for 31 percent of e-commerce sales in the US, according to Euromonitor.

Meanwhile, Walmart and Target, despite the dominance of their brick-andmortar chains, each get a piddling 3 percent of the online market.

The gap with Amazon looks daunting, but Walmart still looks poised to leapfrog past Target if it makes good on its reported talks to buy Hoboken, N.J.-based Jet.com, according to Slice In- telligence, a San Francisco-based research firm.

“Target and Walmart have been neckand-neck in online sales for the past 12 months,” according to Slice Intelligence analyst Ken Cassar.

In a pool of sales reaped by Walmart.com, Target.com, Kmart.com and Jet.com combined, Walmart’s share is 45.8 percent, while Target’s is slightly higher at 46.2 percent, Slice said.

Meanwhile Jet’s share of that pool — and, accordingly, the size of the percentage-point advantage it would give Walmart over Target — is 6 percent, Cassar noted. (Kmart.com’s share is 2 percent.)

That’s despite the fact that Jet only launched in July 2015. In May, Jet said it logged $85 million in sales, giving it an annual run rate of about $1 billion.

The talks between Walmart and Jet, first reported by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, could result in a deal worth $3 billion.

Both companies have declined to comment.

Acquiring Jet could give Walmart a particular boost in consumer packaged goods, Cassar notes. Groceries, as well as health and beauty products, accounted for a quarter of Jet’s sales.

By comparison, those fast-moving products only accounted for 5 percent of sales on Walmart.com — despite the fact that they’re key categories at Walmart’s retail stores.