Amazon Brings 1-Hour Delivery to Hundreds of Cities

The new service, announced Tuesday (March 17), comes as the eCommerce giant looks to fend off competition in the delivery space from main rival Walmart.

“Our customers are busier than ever and are looking for new ways to save time while keeping their households running,” Udit Madan, senior vice president of worldwide operations at Amazon, said in a news release.

“We saw an opportunity to use our unique operational expertise and delivery network to help make customers’ lives a little easier while unlocking even more value for Prime members.”

According to the release, one-hour delivery is now available to customers in hundreds of U.S. cities, including sections of major metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., plus smaller cities such as Des Moines, Iowa.

Three-hour delivery is being offered in more than 2,000 communities of all sizes, with more areas slated to be added in the months ahead. Amazon has set up a page that lets customers check the availability of one-hour and three-hour delivery in their area.

Last year saw Amazon expand its same-day and next day delivery service for Prime members while also integrating perishable groceries into the same-day delivery service.

The company also expanded the reach of Amazon Now, which delivers everyday essentials, fresh groceries and locally in-demand items in less than 30 minutes, and announced plans to test 30-minute delivery in parts of Philadelphia and Seattle.

Walmart, meanwhile, has said it can deliver products to 95% of households in the U.S. in less than three hours. That is “thanks to the retailer’s physical footprint of brick-and-mortar stores, which are fast becoming crucial micro-fulfilment nodes,” as PYMNTS wrote last year.

In more recent coverage of the rivalry between the two retail titans, PYMNTS noted that while Walmart is investing in supply chain automation, with 23 of its 42 regional distribution centers in the U.S. now being retrofitted, Amazon is changing what its search engine can do.

That means an expansion of Shop Direct, a program that surfaces products from other retailers’ websites that Amazon does not carry. It’s a change that “makes Amazon a gateway to the wider internet, not just its own marketplace,” the report said.

Walmart, meanwhile, plans to open several “Store of the Future” locations, which are “designed to blend automation, digital integration, and improved customer experiences into a new retail model,” the report added.