Walmart to buy Jet.com
Marc Lore, the founder at Jet.com, will continue in his lead role even after the sale to Walmart Jet.com

Walmart will reportedly announce the acquisition of e-commerce startup Jet.com on Monday (8 August). The deal is expected to value the two-year-old online retailer at $3bn (£2.29bn; €2.70bn), according to unnamed sources.

The potential deal was first reported last week. According to reports, Marc Lore, the founder at Jet.com, and some senior executives at the startup will now have an opportunity to earn an incentive bonus on top of their share of the deal value.

More from IBTimes UK

The deal is expected to include the startup's proprietary technology, its customer lists, supplier contacts and Lore's expertise. Lore will also reportedly continue in his lead role even after the sale. He is expected to additionally run Walmart's US e-commerce operations after the potential deal closes.

One of the technologies that Lore had previously explained was related to identifying in real time the flow of orders. This technology helped backend operations by routing orders to the right vendors and helped keep fulfilment and shipping costs low.

According to sources, such technologies were now considered attractive to Walmart. They said Walmart would be able to reduce its shipping costs and delivery speeds, if it could successfully implement these technologies across its existing stores and warehouses. Walmart is also expected to use Jet's technologies on its other e-commerce sites and to expand its presence in the third-party marketplace model.

The deal will mark the largest US acquisition in the e-commerce space. It will beat 2015's $2.4bn sale of Zulily, a Washington-based e-commerce company, to QVC.

Walmart, the world's largest retailer, is said to be expecting the deal to help it close the online sales gap with Amazon. While the former had online sales of about $14bn in 2015, the Jeff Bezos-led giant's figures were about $99bn last year.

MarketWatch cited analysts at Pacific Crest, commenting on the potential deal as: "[W]e think that a combination of Wal-Mart's best-in-class logistics and significant buying power ($482bn in revenue in 2015) and Jet.com's high-growth retail model would make the combined business a formidable competitor."