Amazon to Shut Down Prime Now App and Site

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The standalone app hasn’t been pulling its weight.

The sheer convenience of Amazon Prime is well-understood by now, offering next-day shipping on just about anything any random consumer could possibly desire, from food to books to kitchenware to whatever else. In an effort to streamline this quick process even further, Amazon debuted Prime Now back in 2014. Prime Now was a sort of spin-off service that a customer could use to have certain simple essentials like groceries and home goods delivered in a couple of hours for an extra shipping fee. Prime Now has been a fairly successful service, with Amazon operating dedicated Prime Now warehouses all over the United States, but in an effort to consolidate their services, it’s still getting the axe.


“To make this experience even more seamless for customers, we are moving the experience from a separate Prime Now app onto the Amazon app and website so customers can shop all Amazon has to offer from one convenient location,” announced Stephenie Landry, vice president of grocery at Amazon.

By the end of 2021, the Prime Now app and site will be retired entirely, with all of its functions, services, and product stock redirected to the standard Amazon app and site.

“In 2014, I wrote a six-page document outlining a service that would allow customers to get last-minute items in about an hour,” Landry said in a blog post. “We even gave the project the internal code name ‘Houdini.’ In just 111 days, our team took the concept outlined in that six-page document and turned it into Prime Now, which became the foundation for Amazon’s ultrafast grocery and same-day delivery businesses.”

The retiring of Prime Now is part of Amazon’s ongoing streamlining efforts, following the closure of Prime Pantry earlier in the year and the closure of one of the cashier-less Amazon Go Grocery locations.

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