Amazon Takeout & Delivery began its trial run of the restaurant delivery service in the company’s home city, Seattle.
Started by the conglomerate Amazon.com Inc., the service is available through takeout and deliveries in more than 100 restaurants in the city, competing with the likes of GrubHub and Delivery.com. While it’s not the company that does the actual delivery, it connects the customers to restaurants that do.
Customers can use their account on the e-commerce website when placing orders through the restaurants’ websites or mobile apps. Reportedly, restaurants decide the delivery fee and set the minimum numbers of orders.
Amazon’s delivery service enters an already refined market, competing with giants such as GrubHub. The California-based delivery service operates in 600 cities and partnerships with more than 28,000 restaurants. Around 172,700 consumers use GrubHub daily.
Uber, which has been under fire from multiple cities recently, started the mobile app UberFresh that ties up with drivers to make restaurant deliveries. It promises to deliver lunch meals in under 10 minutes. The company plans to include dinner deliveries, too.
It currently operates in Beverly Hills and West Side Los Angeles. However, UberFresh posted in its blog that they will expand in other cities soon.
A number of restaurants like McDonald’s and Burger King have already launched mobile apps that help with delivery to compete with companies focusing solely on deliveries.
Other specialty delivery services including San Francisco-based TryCaviar and Munchery, Baltimore-based OrderUp, and Seattle-based Peachd.
In the U.S. alone, there are more than 600,000 restaurants. Munchery investor Scott Stanford said that if the nation can support more restaurants, then there’s also more room for delivery service.
A survey conducted by the National Restaurant Association shows that 75% of a restaurant’s business happens outside the store, through delivery, takeout, drive-thru and curb-side order.
