Lore will stay on as a strategic adviser through September. The retailer didn’t name a new executive to inherit the U.S. ecommerce business that generates more than $25 billion in sales and has been responsible for a good chunk of Walmart’s growth in recent years, especially during the pandemic, as more shoppers migrate online.

(Bloomberg)—Walmart Inc.’s Marc Lore, the architect of its digital operations, is leaving the retailer at a time when its battle with Amazon.com Inc. is growing even more intense.

Lore, 49, plans to retire from the role effective Jan. 31. He will stay on as a strategic adviser through September, the company said in a filing. His contract required him to stay at Walmart for five years, and he’s fulfilling that with his short-term consulting role.

“We view Mr. Lore’s departure as an incremental negative in that it removes a visionary and entrepreneurial executive from the company,” Quo Vadis analyst John Zolidis wrote in a research note. His planned exit could also “suggest that further transformational moves within the digital and ecommerce channels are becoming more difficult to achieve.”

The retailer didn’t name a new executive to inherit the U.S. ecommerce business that generates more than $25 billion in sales and has been responsible for a good chunk of Walmart’s growth in recent years, especially during the pandemic, as more shoppers migrate online. Instead, all the aspects of U.S. retail ecommerce business will continue to report to John Furner, CEO of Walmart U.S., beginning on Feb. 1.

Jet founder

Walmart, No. 3 in the 2020 Digital Commerce 360 Top 1000, brought Lore into the fold when it spent $3.3 billion in 2016 for his startup, Jet.com, an ecommerce site that was unprofitable yet popular with younger urban shoppers that Walmart has long coveted.

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Walmart CEO Doug McMillon quickly put Lore and his lieutenants in charge of the retailer’s U.S. web business, which until then had lacked a coherent strategy and was no match for Amazon. Lore revamped the site, acquired a slew of additional brands and improved delivery capabilities, making Walmart.com a formidable rival to the Seattle-based internet giant.

Not all of Lore’s moves paid off, though, and tensions emerged between Walmart’s digital units housed mainly on the coasts and the leaders of its U.S. store operations based in Bentonville, Arkansas. A lack of communication and cooperation between the two camps hindered progress, and in response, Walmart sought to merge the two units to speed decision-making.

The streamlining process led to the demise of Jetblack, a concierge shopping service Lore created to move Walmart upmarket. Some of his acquisitions, like ModCloth and Bare Essentials, have also been jettisoned. Jet.com, meanwhile, was slowly absorbed into Walmart’s main website, and finally shuttered in 2020.

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Lore didn’t immediately reply to an emailed request for comment through his personal YouTube show.

Food Truck

Lore, who normally participates in Walmart’s quarterly earnings calls with analysts, was noticeably absent on the company’s second-quarter teleconference in August and third-quarter call in November.

Meanwhile, Walmart’s chief customer officer, Janey Whiteside, has taken a more prominent role in recent months, heading up the company’s biggest web-related endeavor to date, the subscription program Walmart+.

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“It’s not wholly unexpected that Lore would leave Walmart,” Jennifer Bartashus, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, said in an interview. “The company has built a pretty deep bench with regards to talent, especially in the ecommerce side of the business.”

In December 2019, Lore embarked on a plan to sell some of the Walmart shares he received as part of the acquisition. So far he’s disposed of roughly 1 million of them and collected $130 million in proceeds, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The proceeds from the sales could help fund what’s reported to be Lore’s next venture, a startup dubbed Food Truck Inc. that will prepare and deliver high-end meals to affluent suburbanites. There, Lore will work alongside some of his longtime acolytes as well as his younger brother Chad, a former managing director at Deutsche Bank, according to a report. Food Truck didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

Amazon sale

Walmart missed out on its first chance to hire Lore. Amazon (No. 1) outmaneuvered the retailer a decade ago to acquire his first startup, Quidsi, which operated Diapers.com and Soap.com. In 2016, McMillon bought Jet.com to make sure Walmart didn’t miss out again.

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Lore spent his early years in an Italian neighborhood on Staten Island, before his family moved to Lincroft, New Jersey, while he was in middle school. He displayed entrepreneurial chops at an early age, charging family members five cents each to watch cartoons on a slide projector while just six years old. By 14 he was trading stocks using his parents’ money. After graduating from Bucknell University, he spent a few years working in risk management on Wall Street but left finance for the startup world.

His first company, The Pit, let sports fans value and trade sports collectibles like shares of stock. He sold the business to the Topps trading card company in 2001 for $5.7 million, less than 12 months after starting it.

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