If you’re an online shopping fiend, you may have heard of the AmazonFresh service (no, the name’s not missing a space) as an alternative to other grocery sites. But what is AmazonFresh and is it actually any good?
What is AmazonFresh?
In short, AmazonFresh is another online grocery service, with the twist that it’s only available to Amazon Prime and Fresh members. Its unique selling point? Same-day delivery for certain items to eligible postcodes (notice those important caveats).
The AmazonFresh homepage is certainly impressive, offering a cornucopia of delicious treats and attractive deals. There’s everything from eggs to fresh flowers, booze to pet food, notepads to makeup. You can even stock up on the weekly Ferrero Rocher…
But, if you’ve visited the site, you might have already noticed a serious problem with AmazonFresh. I live in the East Sussex wilderness and was greeted with the following pop-up:
Great. A swift Google search revealed that, unless you live in the greater London area or certain parts of the Home Counties, your access to AmazonFresh is denied. You can find a full list of the eligible postcodes here.
Is AmazonFresh any good?
If you’re one of the lucky few (well, few millions) who can use it, there’s another hurdle to using the service: you have to spend over £40. After that, you’ll be paying £3.99 for delivery, which shrinks to nothing for orders over £60.
Big-hitters Asda, Morrisons and Ocado share the £40 threshold – but their groceries are cheaper and, obviously, you don’t have to be an Amazon Prime member (£79 per year or £9.99 per month) to use them. Meanwhile, the minimum order for Sainsbury’s and Tesco is £25.
To prove that using Amazon will cost you more, I put together a simple test: how much are two pints of semi-skimmed milk? The cheapest you can get on AmazonFresh is Morrisons’ own-brand offering for 86p. Here’s how that compares…
| Asda | 79p |
| Tesco | 80p |
| Sainsbury’s | 80p |
| Ocado | 80p |
| Amazon | 86p |
6p might not sound like a huge difference, but that 7% gap will be noticeable when scaled up over a weekly shop.
All of this makes AmazonFresh a tricky sell. In its favour, you’re able to buy cheaper own-brand Morrisons products, it includes items you simply can’t get on the high street and you can use Amazon Echo devices to put together a shopping list.
But there are too many negatives – including the small matter of most of the country not being able to use it. In fact, there are rumours that customer discontent in the US could lead to Amazon binning the service completely.
However, it must be emphasised that I haven’t actually used AmazonFresh – even though I’d like to test it fully. If, therefore, you’re a devotee who orders their weekly shop via the service, please defend its honour in the comments section below.
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