Will Jet.Com Beat Amazon On Price?

When it comes to offering the lowest prices online, Jet.com might be poised to bring Amazon down to earth.

A new study from Boomerang Commerce (via The Wall Street Journal) looked at a sampling of 200 items available on both eCommerce startup Jet and industry titan Amazon, and found that the startup — which has yet to officially launch — offered lower prices than the mainstay in 188 (94 percent) of those cases.

As the WSJ cautions regarding the report, there currently exists a wide gap between the total number of items currently available on Jet and what is available on Amazon — with Boomerang tallying the numbers at about 5 million for Jet, compared to a much more robust 300 million for Amazon.

The Boomerang study found that prices on Jet — which is currently in a beta testing phase with limited consumer access — were 27 percent lower overall than those found on its much larger competitor. The startup’s prices showed to be 17 percent lower than Amazon’s on items not offered by third-party sellers.

One area where the Jeff Bezos-founded company did come out on top in the Boomerang study was in its private-label brand, with Amazon’s so-called “Basics” showing as 28 percent cheaper than similar products offered on Jet.

According to the WSJ, Jet plans to compete with Amazon by charging an annual membership fee of $50 and consolidating order volumes and shipping distances, compared to Amazon’s option of a $99 Prime membership or paying per order for two-day shipping.

“Jet is clearly waging a pricing war with Amazon,” said Boomerang CEO Guru Hariharan in a interview, reports the WSJ. “There are some early indications that Jet is leading on price, but there is still good value in Prime.”

While Amazon would not comment on the Boomerang study to the WSJ, Jet founder Marc Lore did. Of the opportunity for Jet customers to save by ordering in larger quantities, he remarked to the outlet, “The whole point is [Amazon doesn’t] have that mechanism and Jet does. Jet only profits from membership fees, which allows Jet to give back all of the profit it would have made from selling products back to customers.”