Amazon has started a new service, which takes food orders and deliver them right to your doorsteps. It's an exclusive service though, and only the 650,000 residents of Seattle can use it as of the moment.
Amazon Local has been released for Seattle customers to deliver food to their homes, The Verge reported.
The new service requires the users to enter their address and select from a list of restaurants that the service has collected. After selecting a restaurant, a menu will be displayed where the user can choose what food to deliver or take out. The payment is done through the users' credit card saved to their Amazon account.
Amazon Local is currently covering around 20 restaurants for delivery service and around 110 for takeout orders, according to TechCrunch. The service has started as a Groupon-like service and expanded to offer other kinds of services. The service is said to compete against food delivery sites, such as Seamless, Grubhub and Delivery.com.
Besides food delivery, Amazon has also implemented a new grocery delivery service called Amazon Fresh. It has also launched a point-of-sale service called Amazon Local Register. The service has been compared against Square and Paypal, which also offer point-of-sale app and card-reading hardware.
Speculations have suggested that the company is working on their products to help connect customers with the local businesses. The goal of Amazon is to converge these services into assisting their customers and also to expand them to many more markets, which builds on the company's basic principle of economies of scale.
Reports have also arisen that Amazon is building its local commerce service into a "larger, physical extension" of what has been released online. A source has reported that the restaurants and registers are simply the beginning of Amazon's plans.
"They'll be going live with other verticals, and deeper features in the coming months," the source told TechCrunch.
Amazon Local has been live on the Amazon Local website and on its Android and iOS application. Amazon has yet to officially announce the food delivery service. Hopefully, Amazon will expand the service's coverage to cater the delivery needs of other consumers from other places in the future.
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