Marc Lore, the e-commerce entrepreneur who founded Walmart Inc. ‘s counterattack against Amazon. com Inc., is leaving the retail giant after incorporating many of its online operations into the rest of its business.
Mr. Lore, who founded Jet.com and joined Walmart in 2016 after buying his business, pushed the brick-and-mortar giant to increase its online offering, including the addition of more web inventory and distribution centers.
But over the past few years, many of its oversight areas have been merged into Walmart’s retail operations. Walmart turned off Jet.com to focus on Walmart.com, and its e-commerce executives and teams reported to the head of Walmart’s US stores.
Walmart said Mr. Lore, the US e-commerce chief, retires on January 31 and remains a consultant until September. The company said it would merge its U.S. retail and e-commerce operations in 2020. After the retirement of mr. Lore will continue the business to report to John Furner, the company’s U.S. CEO.
“I think we had a five-year plan on what we wanted to achieve and I think we did pretty much exactly what we wanted to do,” he said. Lore said in an interview. “The hope was that by then we would be turning e-commerce and stores into one omni-organization and that we would have one leader.”