SEATTLE – Is Amazon.com Inc. making another convenience-store play?
The e-commerce website has announced that its Prime Now service will offer one-hour delivery from local stores in addition to the tens of thousands of items offered by the online marketplace. In Manhattan, customers can now purchase groceries, prepared meals and baked goods from D’Agostino, Gourmet Garage and Billy’s Bakery through the Prime Now app.
To further leverage its convenience-store play, Amazon also plans to roll out its own line of food under its existing Elements private label.
Amazon launched local store delivery through Prime Now in select neighborhoods in Manhattan on May 21 and will expand across Manhattan in the coming weeks, it said. Prime Now will continue to add new stores to its one-hour delivery service. In Manhattan, upscale Italian marketplace Eataly and Westside Market will be the next to launch.
“Our Prime Now hub in Manhattan is home to tens of thousands of products that are being delivered to customers in an hour or less. Now, we are expanding the service to include delivery from local stores. So whether you’re ordering diapers and a big-screen television from Amazon, fresh produce from D’Agostino, a chef-made prepared meal from Gourmet Garage or cupcakes from Billy’s Bakery, we will get all of the items right to your door in lightning-fast speeds,” said Dave Clark, Amazon’s senior vice president of worldwide operations. “We are launching delivery from local stores through Prime Now in Manhattan … and will add local stores in other cities where we offer Prime Now soon.”
To purchase from local stores, customers will use the Prime Now app, available on iOS and Android devices. Through the service, two-hour delivery from local stores is free and one-hour delivery, available in select zip codes, is $7.99. Prime Now is currently available in Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Brooklyn, Dallas, Manhattan and Miami.
“We’ve always offered our customers the chance to shop like a chef and get the highest-quality food items from our stores. Now we’re bringing our outstanding products right to customers’ doors, available only through Prime Now for ultra-fast delivery,” said Andy Arons, CEO of Gourmet Garage. “Using Prime Now to deliver to customers in one hour is a no-brainer. It enables us to utilize Amazon’s operations expertise and technology to reach our customers fast with a high level of quality and freshness at prices that customers would find in our stores.”
Amazon Prime is an annual membership program for $99 a year that offers customers unlimited free two-day shipping on more than 20 million items across all categories, unlimited streaming of tens of thousands of movies and TV episodes with Prime Instant Video, over a million songs and hundreds of playlists with Prime Music, early access to select Lightning Deals and access to more than 800,000 books to borrow with the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.
Meanwhile, Amazon is preparing to broadly expand its fledgling lineup of private-label brands to include an array of grocery items such as milk, cereal and baby food, as well as household cleaners, people familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal.
Earlier this month, Amazon sought trademark protection for more than two-dozen categories under its Elements brand, including coffee, soup, pasta, water, vitamins, dog food and household items like razors and cleaning products, said the report.
Amazon has been pushing to expand sales of food online, including through its Fresh grocery delivery, the newspaper said. And last year it rolled out Prime Pantry, which allows customers to order small items that the company generally only offered in bulk, such as a single shampoo bottle or bag of potato chips.
Click here to read the full Journal report.
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