Amazon launches restaurant delivery service in London via the Prime Now app; delivery is free on all orders over £15
Back in July we reported that Amazon was set to launch a restaurant delivery service in London for its Amazon Prime customers and now the e-commerce giant has done just that.
Context & Ripple Effects
Amazon has been building this playbook market by market: restaurant delivery first arrived via Prime Now in Seattle in September 2015, then spread to Los Angeles with a stated plan to cover every U.S. Prime Now market by November. London was already its first international Prime Now city after the one-hour delivery service landed there in mid-2015, and just this past June Amazon switched on UK fresh grocery delivery — so today's restaurant launch stacks a second food category onto infrastructure and a member base it already had in place.
What makes the London move notable is the pricing: free delivery on all orders over £15 turns restaurant delivery into a Prime retention lever rather than a fee-generating business, consistent with how Amazon has run the category since Seattle.
First-order effects
- London restaurants gain a new zero-commission-free demand channel overnight, while Prime members can now bundle restaurant meals with the fresh grocery delivery Amazon added in June — both riding the same Prime Now courier network.
- Every qualifying £15+ order is effectively subsidized by Amazon, so the company is paying per-order to deepen Prime engagement rather than to make margin on food.
Second-order effects
- Incumbent UK delivery platforms now compete against a rival that prices delivery at zero for members, forcing a choice between matching subsidies they can't fund with Prime economics or ceding the high-frequency dinner occasion.
- Restaurants and couriers will multi-home across apps, which pressures take rates and driver supply across the whole London market, not just Amazon's orders.
Third-order effects
- The arc of the corpus suggests owned restaurant delivery was always contingent for Amazon: it later shut down Amazon Restaurants in the UK barely two years after this launch, then pivoted to renting reach instead by giving Prime members a year of Deliveroo Plus free delivery — evidence that Amazon treats last-mile food as swappable Prime plumbing, not a must-own business.
- If that pattern holds, food delivery consolidates around whoever owns the membership relationship, with operators like Deliveroo surviving as fulfillment partners inside someone else's bundle rather than as standalone consumer brands.
The trend: Amazon keeps converting last-mile food delivery from a standalone business into a Prime membership feature — building it where logistics exist, closing it where they don't, and partnering when renting reach beats owning it.