If you need an essential product quickly, it’s hard to beat Prime Now’s one-hour and two-hour delivery options. However, Amazon has decided to stop offering Prime Now as a separate app.
As Amazon explains, Prime Now isn’t disappearing as a service, it’s just moving to become part of the main Amazon app. You’ll still have the option of one-hour delivery on over 25,000 essential items for a $7.99 fee (or no fee if two-hour delivery is good enough), but shopping, tracking orders, and dealing with customer services will be handled in the Amazon app.
Why the change? Amazon says it will offer customers a more seamless experience. The integration has already happened in India, Japan, and Singapore, but now the focus is turning to the US and other markets where Amazon operates. The goal is to move Prime Now, including all third-party partners that rely on it, to the main Amazon shopping experience before retiring the app and website later this year.
Prime Now was originally suggested back in 2014 when Stephenie Landry, vice president of grocery at Amazon, wrote a six-page document “outlining a service that would allow customers to get last-minute items in about an hour.” It was codenamed Houdini and, “In just 111 days, our team took the concept outlined in that six-page document and turned it into Prime Now, which became the foundation for Amazon’s ultrafast grocery and same-day delivery businesses.”
