Amazon has this week stepped up its rollout of branded delivery services in the UK with more one-hour and same-day offers in major cities across the country, and also launched Prime Now in Tokyo.
The e-commerce giant yesterday added the north-eastern city of Newcastle and surrounding areas to the list of cities where the Prime Now ‘one-hour’ delivery service is available, following the launch in London and Birmingham earlier this year. Coverage includes nearby Sunderland and Durham.
Prime Now is made available through Amazon Logistics which uses independent local, regional and national delivery companies across the UK to deliver Amazon parcels to customers seven days a week. Deliveries will be made from Amazon Logistics’ delivery station in Gateshead, Newcastle.
Prime Now customers can choose delivery within one hour of ordering for £6.99, or free delivery within a choice of two-hour, same-day delivery slots between 8am and midnight, seven days a week. More than 15,000 products, ranging from pizzas and ice-cream to electronic goods, are available for ultra-fast delivery.
“We’re thrilled to expand our one-hour delivery service to Newcastle, our latest Prime Now city in the UK,” said Christopher North, Managing Director at Amazon.co.uk. “We have already received great response from Prime Now customers in London and Birmingham and we’ve seen high demand on everything from essentials such as nappies and toiletries to must-have video games and toys—we are excited to delivering to more customers in record-breaking time.”
One of the fastest Prime Now deliveries to date was a USB cable and a set of replacement electric toothbrush heads which were ordered at 20:35, shipped from Amazon’s Wimbledon delivery station in London and delivered at 20:49 to an address in Morden, according to the company.
On Wednesday, Amazon expanded its recently-launched Prime Same Day service, offering Prime members free same-day delivery on one million items, to more British cities. Launched in Greater London and parts of Hertfordshire and Berkshire earlier this month, the service is now available to residential addresses in Birmingham, Bristol, Dudley, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Milton Keynes, Northampton, Walsall and Wolverhampton. Amazon said it will continue to expand Prime Same Day to other areas of the UK in 2016.
Prime members who place an order for same-day delivery by noon, on any day of the week, will receive their delivery between 6pm and 10pm on that same evening. There is no minimum order value.
“Prime members are telling us that they love the convenience of free same-day delivery so we are quickly introducing it to many new areas of the UK. And we continue to invest in our delivery network to expand our fast delivery options to even more Prime members,” North added.
Meanwhile, Amazon has also launched Prime Now one-hour deliveries in eight districts of Tokyo, the Wall Street Journal reported. It described the service as a response to Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten which launched its own ’20-minute’ deliveries in four districts in the capital in August.
