If you think Jet, the upstart eCommerce site recently acquired by Walmart in a $3.3 billion deal, beats Amazon’s products on pricing, you might want to think again.
A study conducted by Boomerang Commerce for Business Insider found that Jet’s prices were more than Amazon’s at least 44 percent of the time on 331 bestselling items, and Jet’s prices were only found to be lower 16 percent of the time.
The study also found Jet’s prices to be 16 percent higher overall, and Amazon had a much larger overall inventory than its would-be rival.
Brandon Young at Boomerang said Jet only appears to stock items that it can get a good deal on.
“Where Amazon is an endless aisle and sells items forever, Jet is more flash sale,” Young told Business Insider.
Although Young did think that, thanks to Jet’s acquisition by Walmart, both pricing and inventory could soon be improving.
“They’re now dealing in much bigger volumes. They may be able to leverage that to get much bigger deals,” Young said.
However, the study did not take into account Jet’s “secret sauce,” the eTailer’s propriety basket-building savings model that chops prices on items that can be shipped together. Business Insider said that Jet’s basket-building savings model adds about a 5 percent discount per basket.
“For those items viewed on Jet, we are more frequently at parity with or below Amazon shipped and sold, but the more important point is that our baskets cost less when people shop smarter using our proprietary system,” Jet said in a statement.