Amazon vs. Convenience Stores – ‘Instant Pickup’ Arrives

In an effort to continue providing additional benefits to a Prime subscription, Amazon is now launching a service that allows you to easily pick up orders within 2 minutes of purchasing. Amazon is coining this service Instant Pickup, and it marks a strong next step for the brand moving further into the brick-and-mortar space.

Beginning this week, ‘Instant Pickup’ will be available at five campus locations in Atlanta, Columbus, Berkeley, College Park, & Los Angeles. Within the next two months, there are plans to expand ‘Instant Pickup’ to 22 more college campuses. Because there aren’t many pickup locations, only a limited number of customers will be able to take advantage of the service. However, these pickup points tend to be on campuses, making them ideal for students – allowing for a quick and convenient way to grab any purchases between classes.

In late 2016, Amazon launched a round of test stores, with new proprietary ‘Amazon Go’ technology powering the experience. The end result was the ability for customers to walk into a store and leave without having to interact with a checkout process of any kind. Using their phone (connected to their Amazon account), customers were automatically logged in and billed for any items they left with.

Additionally, in June Amazon moved to acquire Whole Foods for close to $14 billion, further cementing their move towards bringing the world of offline shopping into the scope of their offering. The biggest question facing the brand now is how best to combine these two worlds? Up to this point, no service has unlocked the key in combining online & offline purchasing (especially when it comes to the CPG space). With ‘Amazon Go’ & now ‘Amazon Instant,’ it feels like the brand is working to understand how each step in the offline purchasing process works best, in the hopes of packaging it all together into an entirely new way to think about shopping.

For now, ‘Amazon Instant’ is another step in upgrading the product offering around the top e-commerce brand has available. Going forward, it will certainly be interesting to see how Amazon ultimately decides to combine every innovation into one cohesive online/offline hybrid, but until that point, most of us will have to be content with 2-day Prime shipping.