Amazon Delivers One-Hour Service To London

Amazon’s Prime Now service, which offers one-hour delivery from local stores, is now also available in London. Amazon follows Apple’s track by launching Prime Now in London, its first launch outside of the U.S.

According to its website, Amazon UK offers the new service to Amazon Prime members on orders worth £20 ($31.31) or more for a fee of £6.99 ($10.94). A video advertises the merits of the Prime Now app, which lets customers choose a delivery time anywhere from 8 a.m. to midnight and track where their product is in the delivery process.

Amazon expects to reach all of London and other U.K. cities by the end of 2015, according to BBC. “This is just the beginning. London is our first Prime Now city in the U.K., and we are already working on making Prime Now available in more postcodes in London and beyond,” Christopher North, managing director of Amazon UK, said in a statement posted on the online retailer’s website.

Amazon’s one-hour delivery service was first launched in New York City in December last year, followed by Baltimore, Dallas and Miami. The service costs $7.99 for one-hour delivery and is provided free of charge for two-hour delivery.

Local store delivery through Prime Now was launched in May in select neighborhoods in Manhattan. To ensure its Prime members get the one- and two-hour deliveries that are being promised in the fast-paced, traffic-packed New York City, Amazon has taken to the streets in one of the older forms of transportation — the subway — instead of always focusing on new technologies, the Financial Times reported.

Worldwide paid membership to Prime grew 53 percent in 2014, according to Amazon. But Amazon’s first quarter earnings posted another loss in April, bringing the company back into the red to the tune of a net loss of $57 million. The most recent public data about Prime from Amazon was that it had gained 10 million new Prime members during the holiday season.

Millward Brown’s latest data on the spending habits of Amazon Prime users states that Prime members convert on sales 22 times more than shoppers on other eCommerce sites. Overall, the research found that Amazon Prime members convert on purchases 74 percent of the time.

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