Amazon India has now officially unveiled Prime Now for customers in Bengaluru, Mumbai, New Delhi, and Hyderabad, bringing 2-hour delivery to Prime members in those regions. This is, of course, not an entirely new application or service, as the online retail giant has been offering the service under the “Now” branding prior to this announcement. However, the new branding – namely, Prime Now – seems to add further features for Amazon Prime members in India. Along with the usual same-day and next-day delivery options available on over 10,000 products for users in those areas, a new 2-hour express option is there for Prime members. That effectively allows those users to choose 2-hour delivery windows for anytime between 6:00 am and midnight. Sameer Khetarpal, Amazon’s Director in the Grocery department of Category Management, says that the company is excited to expand its options and Prime benefits with the rebranding.
As to the types of products available, those obviously include a wide variety of items that aren’t necessarily difficult to deliver in a short time-span. Categories of items are Fruits & Vegetables, Grocery, Staples, Meats, and Home & Kitchen but those are generally limited to items that are “fulfilled by Amazon.” That means these are only items that Amazon can guarantee delivery of since they are directly part of the delivery chain. It also includes products from local partner stores like Big Bazaar, Aditya Birla More, Licious, and Pescafresh. Home & Kitchen is a new category which contains home and kitchen essentials ranging from small electronics and mobile devices or tablets to appliances and furnishings.
Meanwhile, the company has made it a bit easier to get started via an application made specifically for use with the service, called Amazon Prime Now. That’s restricted in use to the areas where the new service is available, so it can only be downloaded in those regions. There’s no word on if or when Amazon might expand this type of service to other areas of its global empire. However, it should make things quite a bit easier than trying to search through the full website for options since it takes away all of the guesswork. It goes without saying that’s free to download so anybody interested will want to head over to the Play Store via the button below.
