Walmart rewrites its e-commerce strategy

New York

TRADITIONAL retailers have spent more than a decade and billions of dollars trying to transform their brick-and-mortar businesses for the online shopper. Yet Amazon and other digital upstarts continue to lap them.

Now Walmart, the world's largest retailer and the dominant player of big-box stores, is turning to someone else's technology and talent. On Monday, the company said it was buying Jet, the year-old online bulk retailer, for US$3.3 billion, the largest deal ever for an e-commerce company.