Skip to main content

Amazon Has Launched A GrubHub Rival For Food Takeout & Delivery


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.

IMG_3033The 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.

Some of Amazon’s local merchant business has already launched by way of Amazon Fresh, where the company has gone beyond grocery delivery to a new “Spotlight” service —  a selection of items from a variety of businesses, from ready-to-cook meals from restaurants through to other “local favorites” on the food front like cupcakes, teas and speciality ingredients.

It has also, of course, launched its point-of-sale service, Amazon Local Register, which competes against the likes of Square and PayPal with a point-of-sale app and card-reading hardware.

From what we understand, the idea is for Amazon to converge these services, similar to what it has done for consumers, as well as expanding them to many more markets, building on its basic principle of economies of scale.

So, for example, just as Amazon lets people order takeout food and charge it to their Amazon accounts, Amazon will use its connections with the restaurants and other merchants that are part of its delivery network to upsell them as customers to its Local Register product.

As a source told us when we first reported that Amazon was working on takeout and delivery, “Restaurants and the register product are the start. They’ll be going live with other verticals, and deeper features in the coming months.”

Which vertical might come next? As we noted in June, it looks like it might be travel. Skift reported last month that the e-commerce behemoth would be launching a new travel portal called Amazon Travel, likely to go live around January 1. It will focus first on hotel bookings before expanding to other services like flights. But as you might have clocked in the picture above, there is already a tab for searching for and booking hotel deals when you have Amazon Local set to Seattle as your home town.

We have contacted Amazon for comment and will update this post as we learn more.
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document?  That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the docum...
1 comment
Read more

Build Your Own Awesome Personal 3D Avatar with Avatara

Do you use social networks and want to build your own awesome 3D avatar? Maybe you want to send someone a cute cuddly image of yourself (kind of)? Or maybe you have your own ideas of what you would do with an Avatar… Well look no further than Avatara which I discovered from the MakeUseOf directory . You can create 3d avatars out of pre-set up templates or create your own from scratch. To start, visit Avatara’s homepage . You will see this screen: Click Get Started to umm, get started! That will take you to this screen: You see that you can build your own Avatar using an uploaded head shot like the Obama one above (just an example, guys). Or roll with one of their awesome avatars. I chose to start with a blank avatar by clicking Start with a blank avatar at the bottom of the screen. That takes you to here: I clicked on the filter at the top and told it to filter out everything but male characters and then I saw this: I rolled with Buck and continued. You need to click Select...
1 comment
Read more

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a...
Post a Comment
Read more