By Sarah Nassauer 

Marc Lore, the e-commerce entrepreneur who ran Walmart Inc.'s counterattack against Amazon.com Inc., is leaving the retail giant after much of the online operations had been absorbed into the rest of its business.

Mr. Lore, who founded Jet.com and joined Walmart in 2016 after it bought his startup, pushed the bricks-and-mortar giant to increase its online offerings, including adding more web inventory and distribution centers.

But in recent years many of his areas of oversight had been combined into Walmart's store operations. Walmart shut down Jet.com to focus on Walmart.com, and its e-commerce executives and teams reported to the head of Walmart's U.S. stores.

Walmart said Mr. Lore, its U.S. e-commerce chief, will retire on Jan. 31 and stay as a consultant through September. The company said it unified its U.S. store and e-commerce operations in 2020. Following Mr. Lore's exit, the business will continue to report to John Furner, the company's U.S. chief executive.

"I think we had a five-year plan on what we wanted to accomplish and I think we largely did exactly what we set out to do," said Mr. Lore in an interview. "The hope was that by that time we would converge the e-commerce stores and stores into one omni-organization and we would have one leader."

Mr. Lore said the high-level goal for his time at the company was "to change the internal and external narrative about Walmart, e-commerce, Walmart as a tech company."

Casey Carl, an executive Walmart hired last September, will take over leadership of the e-commerce and digital responsibilities, under Mr. Furner, Mr. Lore said. When Jet was acquired, Mr. Lore received a restricted stock award, initially worth about $250 million, that fully vested after five years at Walmart.

E-commerce sales have risen during Mr. Lore's time at the company, though in recent years online sales growth has been driven by online grocery sales from stores.

The purchase of Jet.com and the presence of Mr. Lore, a serial entrepreneur who didn't flinch at building unprofitable businesses to compete, ran counter to Walmart's longstanding culture of pinching pennies to boost profits. The move, driven mainly by Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, lifted the standing of e-commerce inside the company and caused tension with some store-based executives.

"Marc's expertise and aggressiveness have been game-changing," said Mr. McMillon in an email to staff Friday. He said that Mr. Lore led the redesign of Walmart.com, and during his time in the role the company added tens of millions of items for sale online and sped delivery times.

The company's stock has moved higher, as more investors see the company as a sturdier competitor to Amazon. Walmart shares have more than doubled over the last five years and are trading near all-time highs. However, Amazon shares have surged 445% over the same period, giving it a market value of roughly $1.5 trillion versus Walmart's roughly $400 billion.

Many of Mr. Lore's key initiatives at the company were dismantled in recent years, deemed too unprofitable or tangential to Walmart's core business. In recent years Walmart has sold or shrunk several small e-commerce startups it purchased, including Bonobos and ModCloth. Jetblack, an unprofitable personal shopping service that let hundreds of paying members order items for delivery by text, shut last year.

Mr. Lore said he felt some acquisitions helped Walmart add assortment to its own website and were successful. "The one area that's fair to criticize is the strategy of building digitally native brands," said Mr. Lore, such as Bonobos, though he believes the company learned through the process.

E-commerce has become an integral part of Walmart's U.S. business during the pandemic, when its stores stayed open and enjoyed a surge in demand for household goods and groceries. The company has focused on online grocery, adding more third-party merchants to its website and rolling out services that let customers pick up orders at its supersize stores. It also recently rolled out a subscription service that resembles Amazon's Prime delivery service.

When Walmart bought Jet in 2016, it was a highflying startup that raised over $500 million from investors. Before the acquisition, Jet predicted it would burn through hundreds of millions of dollars, much of that on marketing to build its shopper base. Mr. Lore won over investors in part because of his success running Diapers.com parent Quidsi Inc., which was sold to Amazon for about $550 million in 2010.

Mr. Lore, 49 years old, said he would return to entrepreneurial pursuits after he leaves, including working to build a "city of the future," he said. He imagines the city as a sustainable community, socially and environmentally, according to people familiar with his plans.

"I'm writing a book. I'm creating a reality TV show. I'm going to probably buy a sports team. I'm going to continue to mentor female founders," he said. The book is about entrepreneurship, said a spokesman. Mr. Lore declined to give details of his TV and sports-team plans.

Mr. Lore bid to buy the New York Mets in partnership with former baseball player Alex Rodriguez and singer Jennifer Lopez last year, he said, but the group came in second. The Mets reached a deal in 2020 with hedge-fund manager Stephen A. Cohen.

Write to Sarah Nassauer at sarah.nassauer@wsj.com

 

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

January 15, 2021 13:15 ET (18:15 GMT)

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