Amazon is to close its London-based takeaway delivery service next month in a rare reverse for the US tech giant.
Customers have received an email saying “you will no longer be able to order from Amazon Restaurants UK after Monday, 3rd December”.
The failure comes just over two years after Amazon launched the service — available on its £79 a year Prime Now app — in selected postcodes in central, east, north and south-east London. It later expanded to much of the rest of the capital.
Orders were promised to be delivered within an hour and available restaurants included eastern European specialists Baltic and Michelin-starred Indian Benares as well as Planet Hollywood and Strada.
However, it came up against fierce competition from home-grown Deliveroo, founded in 2013, and Uber Eats, an offshoot of the cab-hailing business.
One industry observer said: “It is a highly competitive market and perhaps they needed to be more than a logistics company trying to be a food company. There’s an emotional component with food that maybe they didn’t understand.”
Amazon Restaurants first launched in Seattle in September 2015 and was rolled out to other major US cities.
At the time of the London launch in September 2016 the service was free on orders over £15, although a £1.99 flat fee was later introduced. It was launched with 180 restaurants, a further 80 were added that November.
A spokesman for Amazon said today: “We are closing Amazon Restaurants UK. We would like to thank all of our customers and merchants, and delivery partners for their support.”
