The delivery war between Amazon and Walmart has a new front, and it is being measured in minutes.
Amazon confirmed on Tuesday that one-hour and three-hour delivery options are now live in several US cities, including Los Angeles and Chicago.
The one-hour service covers more than 90,000 products ranging from everyday essentials to toys and household goods. The three-hour option has rolled out to over 2,000 cities and towns across the country.
Amazon is not building new infrastructure to make this work. Instead it is repurposing its existing same-day delivery centres, adding dedicated stations for fast orders, yellow labels to help workers pick and move packages quickly, and clearer signage to guide delivery partners through the process.
Prime members pay $9.99 for one-hour delivery and $4.99 for the three-hour option. Non-Prime customers pay $19.99 and $14.99 respectively.
The company is also testing something even faster. A pilot service called Amazon Now is running in Seattle, Philadelphia and parts of London, promising delivery of groceries and daily essentials in 30 minutes or less.
The competitive context is straightforward. Walmart already reaches around 95 percent of US households with next-day or faster delivery, and its strength in groceries gives it a meaningful edge in the category Amazon is most aggressively trying to crack. Amazon’s push into faster delivery and grocery essentials is a direct response to that gap.
“We saw an opportunity to use our unique operational expertise and delivery network to help make customers’ lives a little easier while unlocking even more value for Prime members,” said Udit Madan, Amazon’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Operations.
For consumers, faster delivery with no new app or service to sign up for is a straightforward win. For Walmart, the pressure to respond is growing. And for the rest of retail, the baseline expectation for how quickly an order should arrive just moved again.
