Amazon’s Prime Now service now offers one-hour delivery of more than 7,000 products from select local London shops in addition to 15,000 items offered by Amazon. Prime customers in selected London postcodes are now able to purchase luxury health, wellbeing and beauty products from John Bell & Croyden – pharmacists to Her Majesty The Queen – and fine wines and spirits from Spirited Wines.
Within the Amazon Prime Now app, customers can browse or search selection by store – John Bell & Croyden or Spirited Wines – and create a separate shopping basket. Prime members can choose delivery within one hour of ordering for £6.99, or delivery within a choice of two-hour, same-day delivery slots at no extra charge between 8am and 10pm. Prime members in London can download the Prime Now app and enter their postcode to see if local shop delivery is available in their area. The minimum order value for Prime Now is £20 per store.
This is all very boring and irrelevant unless you own one of the two shops (or you live in London and want an emergency bottle of gin followed by some concealer to hide the effects of the resultant hangover)… but it does give an indication of Amazon’s expansion plans which are much more interesting than booze and skincare.
Amazon started with next day deliveries and now can deliver within the hour. They started with their own stock, then enabled other retailers to put their stock into Amazon’s warehouses and now (for a few sellers) offer next day delivery from third party retailers own warehouses.
Amazon then added in food deliveries picking up from restaurants and dropping off at consumers houses. Today they’ve announced that they’re collecting non-food items with a delivery experience similar to their food deliveries.
How long will it be before Amazon can collect from any local retailer (either shop or warehouse) anywhere in the country and deliver to customers in that locality within an hour? This will easily compete with Argos’ nationwide same day delivery service but with an even greater breadth of stock.
Amazon delivering within an hour from a couple of London retailers isn’t startling news. Amazon selling stock from retailers, collecting stock and delivering within an hour is amazing and if they do roll this out across the country it’ll change UK retail forever. I certainly won’t be going to the high street in a hurry if someone will do my shopping for me.
6 Responses
How do they list the items for sale- do they group them by supplying shop or as a combined list? A customer ordering lots of low value items from a large number of shops will be logistcally interesting to see.
Food delivery services (such as deliveroo and Just Eat [which requires the merchant to deliver]) make it clear that you are ordering from a specific resturant and not a central service.
>This will easily compete with Argos’ nationwide same day delivery service but with an even greater breadth of stock.
Sainsburys have same day delivery from some stores (order by midday for delivery between 16:00 and 17:00). They could start 1 hour gin delivery if they want!
One hour delivery…where will it end….what a joke
Where will it end? You place something in your Amazon basket and they will have someone waiting at your door to deliver as soon as you press the buy button!
For me, “quicker delivery” misses the point. Suppliers should pause to think of customers’ priorities. I don’t want to spend half the week waiting around for deliveries. I’d like all suppliers to allow me to specify which day the goods arrived (e.g., Thursday, pref p.m.). I’d like free delivery at slack times, and expect to pay for delivery at peak times. But it’s far, far more important to me to have deliveries on a day I can choose than it is to have them today or tomorrow.
So order them the day you are free to take delivery. Some of us have more chaotic schedules that mean we don’t know if we will be at home in any one day until that day. Same day delivery means not having to rework customer schedules simply to receive an order.