Amazon’s new “Amazon Now” ultra-fast delivery for household essentials and fresh groceries passed the speed test on Tuesday.

During a trial of the newly launched service, it took 23 minutes from the click of the order button on the Amazon shopping app to the drop of the items at my house. That time easily meets Amazon’s promise of 30-minutes-or-less delivery.

Amazon Now is rolling out to eligible neighborhoods in Seattle and Philadelphia. Customers using the Amazon app or website can browse a curated selection of fresh produce, meat and seafood, pantry staples, frozen foods, beverages, household supplies and more.

Customers are able to track their order status and tip their driver within the Amazon Now feature. Prime members pay discounted delivery fees starting at $3.99 per order, compared with $13.99 for non-Prime customers, with a $1.99 “small basket” fee on orders under $15.

GeekWire reported last week that Amazon was building out a new rapid-delivery hub at a former Amazon Fresh Pickup site in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. (That site did not fulfill the order I placed on Tuesday.) Amazon this week revealed more details about Amazon Now.

Permit filings detail how employees pick and bag items in a back-of-house stockroom, stage completed orders on front-of-house shelves, and hand them off to Amazon Flex drivers, who are expected to arrive, scan, confirm, and leave with a package within roughly two minutes. The operation is slated to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, “much like a convenience store,” according to the filings.

Keep reading for details on how the process works.

The shopping

My wife prefers to do all the shopping for our household and she does so at several different stores including Trader Joe’s, Fred Meyer, Town & Country, and Costco. Our neighborhood, Ballard, isn’t exactly a food desert, and prior to conducting my Amazon Now test, I passed a Safeway en route to stops at Walgreens and Metropolitan Market within a few blocks of my house.

But for the sake of speed and convenience and this test, I browsed the Amazon Now selection looking for a few items we could use. I chose a Red Baron frozen pizza ($4.37); 365 by Whole Foods Market multigrain bread ($2.85); a 4-pack of Duracell AA batteries ($5.47); Saltine crackers ($4.05); Sabra classic hummus ($3.95); and a 6-ounce pack of blackberries ($2.17).

The six items totaled $22.86, plus the $3.99 delivery fee, 64 cents in tax, and a $3 tip for the driver — $30.49 total.

There’s either a reason why my wife does all the shopping or groceries really are very expensive these days, because $30 feels like a lot for six items. Although, $7 of that does include delivery fee and tip — the price of on-demand convenience!

The tracking

I placed the order at 12:38 p.m. and the Amazon app and a confirmation email both immediately estimated that delivery time would be 1:05 p.m.

A status bar in the app showed where my items would be in the chain of events: ordered, packed, out for delivery, and delivered.

Within just a few minutes the status changed from ordered to out for delivery, and I watched as a small Amazon vehicle icon made its way west across Seattle toward my house. The delivery estimate time dropped a couple minutes to 1:02 p.m.

When a white van showed up in front of my house in less than 10 minutes I was sure this story was going to go in a different direction about just how speedy Amazon Now is. But my neighbor was getting a bunch of stuff delivered from IKEA — no one shops in stores anymore, I guess.

For what it’s worth, transportation software company INRIX released its annual Global Traffic Scorecard this week, with details on how much time people lose sitting in traffic. INRIX says Seattle congestion is climbing again, especially in last-mile corridors that delivery fleets rely on.

“The [Amazon Now service] may end up distributing demand more evenly across the transportation network, rather than concentrating congestion via larger hubs,” Bob Pishue, transportation analyst at INRIX, told GeekWire.

The delivery

I watched via the app as the Amazon vehicle icon neared my house and I stepped onto my front porch at 1 p.m. to see my driver arrive. Wearing his blue Amazon vest, the driver placed a brown paper Amazon Now bag in my hand for what amounted to a 23-minute process from start to finish.

The driver said he made his pickup from an Amazon Now-specific facility that is located near a Whole Foods location at Roosevelt Way NE and NE 64th Street — roughly 3.5 miles or 15 minutes from my house.

The driver had not heard anything about the planned Amazon Now delivery hub just down the road from my house in Ballard, at 5100 15th Ave. NW.

The groceries

The six items I ordered were packed as neatly as you’d expect, even if the loaf of bread did get a little smooshed.

The frozen pizza was still cold, and so was the hummus. The blackberries looked like any random, small pack of blackberries I might find in the fridge and finish off in one sitting.

The batteries were really the only thing I needed at the moment, and I’d have preferred to be able to buy a more economical pack of 12 or 20, but a four pack was the only option. Maybe four batteries is all anyone needs from their fast-delivery convenience store.

Final thoughts

I’m old school-ish. I like going to the grocery store. I like seeing people, browsing aisles, and talking to the cashier (if they haven’t all been replaced by self-checkout). We’re not in Covid times. No part of me really needs or wants a bag of six random grocery items quickly delivered to my front porch in the name of convenience.

I’m clearly not the target audience for Amazon Now. My 18-year-old watched me as I stood at the window waiting for the driver and asked, “What is it, like DoorDash?”

“I guess so,” I said.

But if I was sick on my couch and wanted soup, Saltines and a ginger ale in 30 minutes or less, and didn’t want to move to go get it, I might use the service again.

Or if I’d already been to the store that day and forgot some items that were needed for dinner, I could see biting the bullet. Especially if the drive back to the grocery store was not so quick.

While at Met Market earlier that morning, I watched a woman in self-checkout pull at her receipt and the whole roll of tape fell out of the machine and rolled across the floor unspooling.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got it!” said the human employee monitoring self-checkers. “I need to show I’m essential.”

Amazon on Monday officially launched Amazon Now, a new ultra-fast service it’s testing in Seattle and Philadelphia that promises delivery in about 30 minutes or less for household essentials and fresh groceries. 

The announcement confirms reporting by GeekWire last week that revealed Amazon was building out a new rapid-delivery hub at a former Amazon Fresh Pickup site in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. Permit filings showed the company planned to test a new delivery concept using Amazon Flex drivers dispatched from the location at 5100 15th Ave. NW.

In a blog post, Amazon detailed the new service, available inside the existing Amazon shopping app and website. Customers in eligible neighborhoods can look for a “30-Minute Delivery” option in the navigation bar, browse a curated catalog, track orders in real time, and tip their drivers. Prime members pay discounted delivery fees starting at $3.99 per order, compared with $13.99 for non-Prime customers, with a $1.99 “small basket” fee on orders under $15.

Amazon Now covers a wide range of items that people tend to need quickly — including milk, eggs, fresh produce, toothpaste, cosmetics, pet treats, diapers, paper products, electronics, seasonal items, and over-the-counter medicines, plus snacks like chips and dips.

Amazon did not provide a timeline for expanding Amazon Now to additional markets.

To hit the 30-minute window, Amazon is using smaller, specialized facilities placed close to where customers live and work.

As GeekWire reported last week, permit filings detail how employees pick and bag items in a back-of-house stockroom, stage completed orders on front-of-house shelves, and hand them off to Amazon Flex drivers, who are expected to arrive, scan, confirm, and leave with a package within roughly two minutes. The operation is slated to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, “much like a convenience store,” according to the filings.

By operating its own Amazon Now micro-stores, the company aims to better control inventory, labor, and pickup efficiency as it pushes deeper into “sub-same-day” delivery — a sector where it is competing with quick-commerce and micro-fulfillment players such as GoPuff, DoorDash, and others.

The new stores could also boost Amazon’s recent effort to integrate fresh groceries directly into Amazon.com orders, letting customers add produce and other chilled items to standard same-day deliveries.

Amazon previously shut down “Amazon Today,” a same-day delivery service that relied on Flex drivers picking up small orders from malls and brick-and-mortar retailers, after reports that drivers often left stores with just one or two items.

Amazon’s new Amazon Now service delivers essentials in 30 minutes using small, local fulfillment hubs.

The post Amazon plans to deliver orders faster than you can fix a sandwich appeared first on Digital Trends.

Amazon will try a new twist on local deliveries at a shuttered site in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood: a retail-style delivery hub for rapid dispatch of Amazon Flex drivers.

Permit filings describe it as a store in which no customers will ever set foot. Instead, Amazon employees will fulfill online orders — picking and bagging items in a back-of-house stockroom, placing the completed orders on shelves at the front of the space, and handing them off to Amazon Flex drivers for rapid delivery in the surrounding neighborhood.

The documents outline a continuous flow in which drivers arrive, scan in, retrieve a packaged customer order, confirm it with an associate, and depart within roughly two minutes. The operation is expected to run 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

It will operate “much like a convenience store,” Amazon says in one filing.

The plans for the former Amazon Fresh Pickup site, at 5100 15th Ave. NW, haven’t been previously reported. The project uses the code “ZST4,” with the “Z” designation representing a new category of Amazon site that aligns with the recently introduced “Amazon Now” delivery type — short, sub-one-hour delivery blocks from dedicated pickup locations.

Recent screenshots shared by Amazon Flex drivers on Facebook show Amazon Now at similarly named sites, such as ZST3 in Seattle’s University District and ZPL3 in Philadelphia, suggesting the Ballard project is part of a broader rollout of small, hyperlocal delivery operations.

It’s part of Amazon’s larger push into “sub-same-day” delivery — in which smaller, urban fulfillment centers carry a limited set of high-demand items for faster turnaround. The company has been trying different approaches in this realm for several years, looking for the right combination of logistics and economics.

Amazon is far from alone in exploring new models for ultrafast delivery. GoPuff, DoorDash, Uber Eats, Glovo, FreshDirect and others all operate variations of quick-commerce or micro-fulfillment networks, often using partnerships or “dark stores” — retail-style storefronts that are closed to the public and used solely to fulfill online orders at high speed.

Amazon’s Flex program launched 10 years ago. Flex drivers are independent contractors who deliver packages using their own vehicles, signing up for delivery blocks through the Amazon Flex app. The program has often been described as Uber for package delivery. 

What’s different about the new Seattle site, and the Amazon Now initiative, is the speed and simplicity of the operation. As described in the filings. it emphasizes rapid handoffs, with drivers cycling through in minutes rather than loading up for longer delivery routes.

The permit filings emphasize that some delivery drivers will use personal e-bikes and scooters to make deliveries, reflecting the smaller size of the orders and the short distances involved.

Testing the economics

Supply-chain analyst Marc Wulfraat of MWPVL International, who tracks Amazon’s logistics network, said the approach is similar to its legacy Prime Now and Amazon Fresh local delivery sites, with the twist of operating more like a store than a warehouse, based on Amazon’s description.

He said that could mean Amazon will stock perishable items in cooler displays in addition to shelf-stable goods. (That could align with Amazon’s recent effort to integrate fresh groceries directly into Amazon.com orders, letting customers add produce and other chilled items to standard same-day deliveries.)

The filing doesn’t detail the types of products to be available from the site, except that they will be “essential items and local products that are in-demand and hyper-focused on the needs of local customers within the community.”

“I tend to view these as lab experiments to test if the concept is profitable,” Wulfraat said. 

The challenge with these small-format sites, he explained, is that each order tends to be low-value, which means the combined cost of fulfilling and delivering it can take up a large share of the revenue — raising questions about whether the model can be profitable.

Amazon has experimented with similar ideas before.

In late 2024, the company shut down “Amazon Today,” a same-day delivery program that used Flex drivers to pick up small orders from mall and brick-and-mortar retailers. CNBC reported at the time that the service struggled because drivers often left the stores with only one or two items, making the cost per delivery far higher than traditional warehouse-based routes. 

That pullback illustrated the economic challenges of ultrafast delivery and smaller orders. But by operating the new Seattle “store” itself, the company should be able to control more of the variables, including inventory flow, pickup efficiency, and the labor required in the process.

Under the plan, the new Ballard hub will be staffed by four shifts of six to eight Amazon employees each — which translates into 24 to 32 employees per day. The site is expected to dispatch about 240 vehicles over a 24-hour period, with peak volumes of 15 to 20 trips per hour.

It will be the second time for this building to host an Amazon retail experiment. The site previously operated as one of only two standalone Amazon Fresh Pickup locations in the U.S., offering drive-up grocery retrieval and package returns for Prime members beginning in 2017. 

Amazon closed the Ballard pickup site in early 2023 amid a broader pullback from several brick-and-mortar initiatives, shifting focus to other Amazon Fresh stores, Whole Foods, and online grocery delivery. The building has been closed since then.

Fitting into the zoning

The emphasis on the retail-style nature of the new Seattle delivery hub could also serve another purpose: helping ensure the facility fits within its retail-focused zoning designation.

The site is zoned for auto-oriented retail and service businesses, and permitted as a retail store for general sales and services, a classification Amazon secured in 2016 when converting the building from a restaurant. (It was previously the longtime location of Louie’s Cuisine of China.)

If the city agrees the new use qualifies as retail, Amazon may avoid a formal change-of-use review — a process that can trigger additional scrutiny, including updated traffic assessments, environmental checks, and requirements to bring older buildings up to current codes.

Amazon’s permit filing repeatedly uses retail terminology and describes Flex drivers as proxies for customers: “Our store will have a small front-of-house area where customer selected products are available for customer representatives (Amazon Flex Drivers) to come in to pick up the purchased products,” reads a narrative included in the filings, dated Oct. 31. 

The approach could also double as a template for areas of the country where officials are cracking down on “dark stores” in retail corridors. Cities including New York, Amsterdam, and Paris have moved to regulate or ban micro-fulfillment centers from storefronts, arguing that they make urban cores less lively and violate zoning codes.

There’s no word yet on Amazon’s timeline for opening the new facility. We’ve contacted the company for comment on the project and we’ll update this post with any additional details.

[Thanks to the anonymous tipster who let us know to look for the filing. If you have newsworthy information to share on any topic we cover, email tips@geekwire.com or use our online form.]