Amazon has announced that it has expanded the reach of its AmazonFresh grocery delivery service in London, and this has more than doubled the postcode coverage of the service since its launch there in June.

The coverage area of AmazonFresh now extends to 190 Greater London postcodes, where Amazon Prime members in those postcodes can now sign up to a 30 day free trial of the service. After that it will be available to those members for £6.99 a month with unlimited deliveries of orders more than £40.

AmazonFresh offers “fast and flexible delivery”. According to Amazon: “One-hour delivery slots are available from 7am to 11pm, seven days a week, and customers ordering their groceries at lunch can have them delivered in time for dinner.”

“We’ve been delighted with the positive response we’ve had from customers across London with our convenient delivery options, vast selection and low prices regularly cited as reasons for using AmazonFresh,” said Ajay Kavan, Vice President of AmazonFresh.

Where most of Amazon’s direct rivals in the grocery business offer next day delivery (with some minor exceptions – Sainsburys is running a pilot of a one hour service) AmazonFresh will be a lot quicker with 1-2 hour time slots on offer to its members.

It is well understood that Sainsburys has bought out the Home Retail Group because of Argos extensive and deep coverage of its one hour FastTrack delivery network. In the short term, only Sainsburys can go head to head with the US online giant, and only then when the merger between Sainsburys and HRG.