Amazon is obsessed with same-day delivery services. The company firmly thinks its key is having Prime customers buy as many retail items as they possibly need on Amazon. It comes as no surprise that Amazon wants to handle your takeout Chinese food or pizza deliveries as well. Over the weekend, the company launched takeout and delivery service through the Amazon Local app and website. According to TechCrunch, the new restaurant delivery and takeout service is at this point only available in Seattle.
Back in June, we wrote about how Amazon was preparing to take on companies like Seamless, Grubhub and DeliveryHero with a restaurant takeout and delivery service that would sit within its Amazon Local app and website. Now that service is live. The Takeout & Delivery feature was quietly turned on over last weekend — when many were probably still working their way through Thanksgiving leftovers. “The holidays are busy. We can help,” the company notes in the app. We have tried out different addresses in Amazon Local and it looks like for now it’s only live in Seattle, covering around 20 restaurants for delivery and around 110 for takeout orders that you pick up yourself. As with other Amazon services, Takeout & Delivery lets you charge everything to your existing Amazon account. As we and others have reported, Amazon has a bigger ambition to build out its local commerce services into a larger, physical extension of what it has built online. This includes what Reuters has described as local services marketplace that would rival Yelp, Thumbtack and Angie’s List.
