Amazon Continues Taking Over the Online Grocery Delivery Game by Making AmazonFresh Free for Prime Members

Starting today, Amazon will no longer charge a $14.99 monthly fee for AmazonFresh—the fresh food delivery service it now offers in some 2,000 cities in the U.S. and elsewhere—on top of a Prime subscription. Now, if a member already pays $12.99 a month for Prime, they will also be able to get AmazonFresh and Whole Foods Market grocery deliveries free of charge. Existing Fresh subscribers can benefit from the new pricing immediately, while new customers will have to register their interest and wait for an invite.

Ever since the tech giant acquired Whole Foods in 2017, Amazon has been strengthening its presence in the world of groceries, and specifically, grocery delivery. By making AmazonFresh more affordable and easier to access for casual Prime members, Amazon is set to compete with other delivery services such as Postmates and Doordash. 

Alongside free delivery, Amazon is also giving users one- and two-hour delivery options for quicker turnarounds, and it’s making users’ local Whole Foods inventory available online and through the Amazon app.

The price change is Amazon’s latest move as it competes with traditional retail grocery stores like Walmart and Target. Back in June, Walmart announced an unlimited grocery delivery service called Delivery Unlimited, which costs $98 a year or $12.95 a month with no additional delivery fees, while Target offers free deliveries for orders over $35 to customers subscribed to its $99 a year Shipt service. Just last month, Uber took convenience to a new level by entering the grocery delivery game.

Although grocery delivery is more complex than delivering a book or consumer electronics, Amazon’s new focus on perishables falls in line with the company’s usual strategy—bring in as many users as possible by offering fast and free delivery that is impossible to replicate at traditional, brick-and-mortar locations, even if it doesn’t make money right away. 

That said, the strategy appears to be working. According to a study done last year, Amazon accounted for about one-third of all grocery delivery in the U.S. 

Now that delivery on a wide selection of fresh goods like meat and produce is just another Amazon Prime perk—alongside one-day delivery on bath towels and streaming your favorite album—it looks like Amazon has a clear lead in the online grocery wars. Oh, and certainly its bid for omnimarket domination.