Amazon expands reach of Prime Now to the Web
Amazon.com is making its Prime Now on-demand delivery service more accessible, but is not adding new markets.
Following several weeks of media speculation, Amazon has made the formerly smartphone app-only Prime Now available as a page on its e-commerce site. Members of the paid Amazon Prime loyalty program in one of the 27 metro areas where Prime Now is available can place orders for one- or two-hour delivery.
Two-hour Prime Now deliveries are free and one-hour deliveries cost $7.99, although one-hour restaurant deliveries are being offered free in select metro areas for a limited time. More than 25,000 items across 25 categories are offered for Prime Now delivery.
In the past month, Amazon has been making a number of efforts to increase the usability of both Prime and Prime Now. These include adding 11 new Prime Now metro areas, making Prime membership available to U.S. customers on a month-by-month basis for $10.99 per month; offering video streaming as a standalone paid service for $8.99 per month; and bundling Prime as a monthly service for Sprint mobile subscribers.
Amazon does not separately report Prime or Prime Now results, but strong financial results suggest these programs are having a positive impact. According to recent eMarketer data, Amazon captured $79.3 billion in U.S. e-commerce sales during the last 12 months, growing 13% from the previous 12 months. Its next-closest rival, Walmart, trailed far behind in e-commerce sales, taking in just $13.5 billion in the last 12 months.
“We have expanded the service rapidly over the last year to new cities, and customers told us that they would want the option to shop on a browser as well as mobile,” Stephenie Landry, general manager of Amazon Prime Now, said in a statement to Re/Code.