Amazon’s new food delivery service, which launched last month in the retailer’s hometown of Seattle, is now available in Portland, Oregon, the company announced this morning. The service is immediately live in select zip codes in the city, but will expand further following the launch. To use the service, customers can download the Prime Now mobile app and enter their zip code to see if delivery is available in their area.
With the Portland expansion, Amazon also says that’s its adding support for deliveries from food carts and food trucks to the service.
At launch, Amazon has signed up restaurants and trucks including Pok Pok, Sizzle Pie, Waffle Window, Seres Restaurant, Luc Lac, East India Co Grill & Bar, Kim Jong Grillin’ and others.
In addition, the retailer offered some metrics regarding how its delivery service has been performing since its Seattle debut. While the app guarantees food deliveries within an hour, Amazon says that its average delivery time since launching restaurant delivery on Prime Now is 39 minutes.
Having been live for only a month before rolling out to a new city, it seems that Amazon intends for Prime Now’s restaurant delivery service to be a key feature for its Prime Now delivery service. While that service was initially associated with traditional online shopping – for things like office supplies, or last-minute gifts, for example – it has expanded to cover more types of on-demand deliveries in recent months, including things like grocery delivery or delivery of beer, wine and spirits in select markets.
That puts Prime Now in closer competition with other on-demand delivery services, like UberEATS, Postmates, or Instacart, to name a few.
Available via a dedicated app for iOS and Android, Prime Now customers can shop a selection of tens of thousands of items on Amazon, then take delivery in one or two hours. Two-hour deliveries are free, and there’s a $7.99 fee for one-hour deliveries. However, with the restaurant delivery option, deliveries are free. At least, they are for the time being – the company notes today that restaurant deliveries are “free for a limited time,” which hints that additional fees may later be assessed in the future. (Amazon also pulls in money through a rev-share model with restaurants.)
Amazon also claims it’s not marking up the prices for the restaurants’ menu items, which may be a competitive advantage for the service over other local delivery options.
For the restaurants, they get exposure to some of Amazon’s “best” shoppers – that is, those who pay the $99 annual fee to be a part of the Amazon Prime membership program and keep their payment information on file for easier ordering. Meanwhile, Amazon has another means of getting customers to regularly engage with its app and buy from its selection of on-demand retail goods.
Amazon had yet to announce where Prime Now restaurant deliveries will roll out to next but it’s likely this will eventually reach all of the supported Prime Now markets. Today, the service is live in Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, Indianapolis, Manhattan, and Miami, in addition to Seattle and Portland.
Comment