Online retailer Amazon today launched Prime Now, a shopping and ordering app for iOS and Android with one-hour delivery directly to a customer’s doorstep in select markets.
Available exclusively to Amazon’s $99 per year Prime members, the software allows you to shop for tens of thousands of daily essentials such as diapers, toys, paper towels, shampoo, batteries and mor, plus gifts like consumer electronics, wearables, books, toys, clothing and other items.
One-hour delivery will set you back eight bucks per order while two-hour delivery is available at no cost.
For the time being, Prime Now is available from 6am to midnight, seven days a week, in select areas of Manhattan, with more markets to be added at a later stage. The app will even ping you when the new delivery services launches in your area.
The elegant application makes it easy to browse categories, add any of the 25,000 available items to the cart directly from search results and even watch as your courier makes their way to you.
While non-Prime members can freely browse available items as a guest, checking out requires you to sign in with your Amazon Prime account credentials.
You could imagine that achieving such a remarkable level of efficiency depends on the vicinity to Amazon’s fulfillment centers which utilize high-end technology to speed up order delivery times for customers.
According to Amazon, a portion of its new building on 34th Street in Manhattan will serve as a hub for delivery of Prime Now orders.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODLp4ZGQwzk
The very notion of having something delivered to your doorstep in under an hour should resonate with busy shoppers who don’t have the time to get in the car and drive to the store or simply don’t want to go.
Prime Now will be rolling out to additional cities in 2015.
In the United States, Amazon Prime membership includes unlimited free two-day shipping on more than twenty million items, instant streaming of tens of thousands of movies and TV episodes through Prime Instant Video, one million songs and hundreds of playlists through Prime Music, early access to select Lightning Deals and access to over 600,000 books to borrow through the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, all in exchange for a flat fee of $99 per year.