A few months after Walmart closed its $3 billion acquisition of Jet.com, the ecommerce subsidiary has made another acquisition of its own. Walmart announced Thursday morning that Jet has acquired ShoeBuy.com, a Boston-based footwear ecommerce company that was one of the first to sell shoes online when it launched in 1999.
Jet paid about $70 million to buy ShoeBuy from its now-former parent company, IAC, Walmart said in a press release. As a result of the acquisition, ShoeBuy will remain a standalone site. The company's CEO, Mike Sorabella, along with his executive team and more than 200 employees, will stay in Boston. ShoeBuy had been acquired by IAC in 2006.
Through the acquisition, Jet will gain the experience of a company that has played the ecommerce game longer than most. When ShoeBuy was founded by Scott Savitz in 1999, it was only four years after Amazon.com had launched. Savitz left in 2011 and formed Data Point Capital, a Boston-based venture capital firm that recently added Leonardo DiCaprio as a limited partner.
ShoeBuy sells more than 800 brands, with over one million items spanning footwear, clothing and accessories for men, women and children — brands that will now have a chance to sell directly through Jet because of the acquisition, Walmart said.
