Jet.com has finally taken off, and price battles of epic proportion are just around the corner.

Fueled by gobs of venture capital cash and bloated hype to match, the e-commerce startup launched this week to $1 million in first-day sales after a limited three-month trial run.

The company amassed an unprecedented $220 million in investor funds before luring a single customer, thanks mostly to the star power of its founder, its novel pricing software and a gutsy scheme to rattle Amazon.

Jet promises a $50 per year membership that buys you the guaranteed lowest prices of anywhere on the Internet — with an algorithm that creates more discounts each time shoppers pile more items into a "smart cart."

Jet also promises a "Jet anywhere" option, which it says allows members to use their discounts at other, unrelated sites online.

And crucially, Jet shows shoppers exactly how much they are saving compared to Amazon.com's prices.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Jet.com is a new rival to Amazon's online dominance. Image: Sipa USA Kristoffer Tripplaar

In an interview with Mashable on Friday, CEO and founder Marc Lore waved away the Amazon-killer parable. He said the two companies' businesses models are too different to compare: Jet is a price-shuffling middle man between merchants and customers, and Amazon a retailer with a sprawling supply chain.

"I don't look at it like that at all," Lore said. "We don't really see ourselves as being a competitor, we're just a conduit for other retailers to more effectively compete."

Maybe so, but more to the point is that Jet absolutely needs to compete with Amazon. By its own projections, it will have to move a daunting $20 billion worth of products by its fifth birthday to get its bearings after what is sure to be a long road of VC-cushioned losses.

That's nowhere near Amazon's $89 billion in sales last year, but Jet still can't get there without seducing away parts of Amazon's customer base, analysts say. Such a figure would put Jet squarely ahead of some of Amazon's biggest rivals by today's market dimensions.

Jet thinks it can outsmart that logic: the company has bet big that an influx of new shoppers expected to hit the e-commerce scene will have different priorities than the wealthier ones before them — namely a zeal for savings at all costs. Even though internet shopping seems convenient and accessible, the vast majority of Americans still do their shopping in stores: E-commerce still makes up less than 10% of the retail industry.

While other companies are preoccupied with convenience and speed at an extra charge to customers, Jet wants to hook the budget-weary people who still do most of their shopping offline.

"Some people will overpay for better service, but the vast majority of people just want to save money," Lore said."That's where we got the idea to combine the best of both worlds — the emotional connection with the consumer combined with the lowest prices anywhere."

In other words, Jet wants a Wal-Mart mentality with a tech startup cachet in place of the low-rent brand image. The company set aside a $100 million chunk of its venture funding for a huge marketing blitz aimed at a mass audience. It began with a promotional video starring Silicon Valley star Kumail Nanjiani and will continue with billboards and television ads.

A long way to the top

It's not especially hard to get a foot into the e-commerce door, analysts say. Tens of thousands of upstarts dot the industry landscape, each anchored in its own shtick. There's the box-a-month clubs, the social good preachers, the "Uber for X"'s and the narrow niche carvers to name a few well-tread templates.

But among the $1 billion-plus-netting mammoths that tower over them, the playing field is sparser. Amazon — the undisputed alpha dog — is trailed by Alibaba (reportedly a Jet backer), eBay, Japanese giant Rakuten, the online appendages of brick-and-mortar big-boxers and few else.

Making a jump for the top stratum is a long and costly slog. Prospective challengers usually burn through piles of investment money, assemble legions of partnering merchants and set their marketing to full blast in a madcap dash to grab a spot at the top and cling to it as the industry powers-to-be fight back tooth and nail.

Jet's trajectory is not for the faint of heart.

In fact, it's the sort of wide-net, full-throttle approach that analysts and investors warn most entrepreneurs not to try at home, according to Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru-Kodali.

"They are doing all the things that we would say you shouldn't do because they've proven to be disastrous for anyone who has entered the gladiator ring with Amazon," Mulpuru-Kodali said. "It's a price play in a world where your biggest competitor has essentially gone nuclear on every other retailer out there."

But with years in the industry under his belt, Lore is a more than formidable enough contender to steer through the turbulence, she said.

"We have somebody who was at some level trained by the masters," Mulpuru-Kodali said. "He understands what the levers are in the business he's up against."

Jet.com founder Marc Lore, left, in his days at his previous startup Qidsi at an Amazon Leadership Breakfast in 2012. Image: Invision for Advertising Week Charles Sykes

A full-on assault

Lore is no stranger to the price war trenches, and he knows firsthand what Amazon is capable of when it throws its weight into choking out a newbie.

A veteran entrepreneur, he was previously best known for Diapers.com, which his e-commerce company, Quidsi, ran along with soap.com, wag.com and other more modestly successful niche outfits. That is, until Amazon relentlessly bludgeoned the baby-wear seller with slash-and-burn diaper discounts and a copycat service called Amazon Mom.

Lore finally agreed to sell his stable of sites to Amazon for $550 million in 2011, then worked at the company for the next two and a half years.

If not outright animus, Jet's price stickers suggest at least a fierce fixation on Amazon. The site is styled essentially as a discount bin of Amazon products: the retail giant's prices sit side by side with Jet's own identical base prices and the final bill comes from subtracting "smart cart" discounts that grow as you add more items.

But the flip side is a lot of price juggling with a web of merchants that can get confusing at times. For instance, when the Wall Street Journal bought 22 items this week, they found that Jet had purchased 12 of them from retailers like Wal-Mart , J.C. Penney Co. and Nordstrom and sold them for a loss of nearly double what they paid.

Some of these kinks will likely iron out as Jet makes in-roads with more venders. But Kirthi Kalyanam, who directs the retail management institute at the University of Santa Clara's business school, questions whether the membership model can cover losses like these in the long run.

"The difference is Costco is well-organized — they know what their products are, it's a very specific set of products — and they own their own supply chain," Kalyanam said.

With Jet still in relative infancy, it's too early to tell the answers to most of these questions. But one thing that does seem sure is that Amazon will never rest easy as long as Jet survives.

"All he needs to do is stay alive and stay in business and he will forever be a thorn in Amazon's side," Mulpuru-Kodali said.