Amazon Expands Manhattan One-Hour Delivery

Amazon may have been shut out of delivery-by-drone in the U.S. for the next few years, but there’s at least some good quick-delivery news for Manhattan customers: The ecommerce giant’s bicycle-delivery service now covers the entire island, according to Mashable.

Amazon launched its Prime Now service in December in a single Zip code, but has been adding neighborhoods steadily over the past two months. The company confirmed that expansion to the rest of Manhattan was complete on Tuesday (Feb. 17).

That means Amazon Prime members who order from a limited selection of items through a dedicated mobile app can get two-hour free delivery between 6 a.m. and midnight. Not surprisingly, the items are all small, and include things like paper towels, shampoo, books, toys and batteries. For one-hour delivery, there’s a $7.99 charge.

The service will also “expand soon to other boroughs,” an Amazon spokeswoman said. She didn’t identify which one would be next, but Amazon Fresh has been doing grocery deliveries in Brooklyn since October, making it the most likely candidate. Additional cities will also presumably be added; Google, which also does same-day deliveries in New York, also does them in Los Angeles.

But Manhattan is arguably the prime candidate for a service like Prime Now. The island is densely populated and compact enough to make one-hour deliveries practical even for low-margin items (there’s no minimum order for the service, Amazon says), with a large enough affluent part of the population to create a pool of likely frequent users, making it a textbook case for a quick ecommerce delivery service.

Manhattan also has wide thoroughfares running the length of the island, cab and truck drivers who are accustomed to bicycle messengers, and a large pool of young workers willing to pedal an eight-hour shift for a reported $15 an hour. And by expanding during a particularly snow-prone winter, Amazon has demonstrated that won’t be a show-stopper, at least for now.

Not yet as clear is whether Amazon can make even what should be this optimal case study profitable. But that’s not news to Amazon: It was an investor in Kozmo.com, a New York City-based one-hour delivery service that launched in 1998 — and was out of business three years later.