Walmart and Jet.com Are Bolstering Online Sales With Purchase Of Shoes.com Domain

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

Retail giant reportedly shelled out $9 million for the competitive domain.

Retail giant Walmart has not been shy about its ecommerce initiatives in the past few years. With its acquisition of Jet.com in August of2016 and a number of other retailers, Walmart is aggressively pursuing a larger chunk of the online marketplace to challenge Amazon’s supremacy.  Walmart used Jet.com to help boost its offerings and challenge Amazon directly.

Walmart also purchased outdoor good seller Moosejaw in February. Now, as part of that strategy, Walmart-owned Jet.com has reportedly paid out $9 million to secure the Shoes.com domain, in the wake of its purchase of Boston-based ShoeBuy for $70 million. Walmart bought the domain name in a bankruptcy auction, and the transaction also included a few other relatively worthless domain names, trademarks, and social media accounts.

A spokesperson for ShoeBuy told Footwear News that the acquisition is merely part of the company’s greater digital goals. “We plan to maximize Shoes.com as the gold standard of category websites,” Shoebuy.com spokesperson Alex Proelss said. “We have made a commitment to modernize how people shop for shoes, and this is [an extension] of that.”

ShoeBuy plans to overhaul the Shoes.com site to make it consistent with the ShoeBuy approach to online retailing, and reflect the parent company’s initiatives. The Canadian company Shoes.com was abruptly shuttered in January, leaving a number of customers hanging with outstanding orders or unprocessed returns, many of which ShoeBuy is trying to facilitate now.

“Jet continues to gain the experience of a well-established e-commerce player in the footwear industry, who has transformed the online shopping experience for millions of customers,” the company said. “ShoeBuy brings access to a large assortment of products, strong industry relationships and rich content.”