Amazon is now expanding its restaurant deliveries through Amazon Prime beyond the United States and into the UK, now offering the service in London.
While there are plenty of options to order takeout in London, including UberEats and Deliveroo, Amazon thinks it can compete and make room for its Amazon Restaurants delivery service as well.
Amazon Prime customers in the UK will soon start seeing a new postcode option inside the Prime Now app and, if they live in a supported neighborhood in London, they'll see a list of restaurants and cafes that can make deliveries. According to Amazon, each order should be completed within the hour. In comparison, it takes the company less than 45 minutes to make restaurant deliveries in the United States.
The company already teamed up with more than 100 restaurants for this new Prime Now delivery service, albeit most of these partners are independent or small businesses. Current partners include Gourmet Burger Kitchen, Pizza Express, Wagamama, Velo, Strada, Tossed, Planet Hollywood, Gastronomica and more.
"London offers some of the best cuisine from around the world, so we're delighted that Amazon Prime customers can now enjoy food from their favourite restaurants via Amazon's ultra-fast Prime Now service," says Al Wilkinson, who leads Amazon Restaurants in the UK. "Based on our own research into what is important to consumers in food delivery, our team have hand-picked a selection of the best quality local restaurants in London. We're excited to be helping many of these small businesses start offering home delivery for the very first time."
Supported postcodes currently include SE1, SE11, W1, WC1, WC2, SW1, SW3, EC1, EC2, EC3, EC4, N1, N16, E1, E2, E3, E5, E8 and E9. Amazon says that it plans to expand the service to more areas and postcodes sometime in the future, but offers no exact timeline at this point.
The Amazon Restaurants service will be available for Amazon Prime members in London and will offer free deliveries for orders over £15, or $20. To further sweeten the deal and tempt more customers to try out its service, Amazon is also offering £10 off when placing the first order through the Amazon Prime Now app and entering the discount code AMAZON10 at checkout.
This will add to Amazon's existing food-related services such as Amazon Fresh and Amazon Pantry. While those aim to compete with supermarkets, however, Amazon Restaurants will go head to head with UberEats and Deliveroo.
It remains to be seen how successful Amazon's new food delivery service will be in the UK, but at least Londoners now have another option to order in.
