Amazon is delivering restaurant food again, through Uber Eats Prime delivery. This time, it is not doing the delivering.
On Thursday, Amazon and Uber announced that Uber Eats is now the official restaurant delivery partner for Prime members in the United States. Prime members can order takeout directly on Amazon.com or in the Amazon Shopping app, with a $0 delivery fee on restaurant orders of $25 or more. No Uber account is needed, no separate app, no new credentials. You search for Uber Eats on Amazon, you order, and Amazon handles the ordering and the delivery alerts while Uber Eats sends the final receipt.
It is, by the numbers, a generous launch. Amazon is offering $20 off each of a member’s first two Uber Eats orders of $25 or more during the first 14 days, and Prime Visa cardmembers earn 5% back on Uber Eats orders through December 5, 2026. Amazon estimates the benefit could save Prime members more than $175 a year, an estimate based on typical order frequency annualised from August 2026 order data, measured against ordering on Uber Eats directly without an Uber One membership. The coverage is vast: hundreds of thousands of restaurants across nearly 10,000 cities and towns, reaching nearly every household in the country, according to Amazon. It is available to every Prime member from today, including the Prime for Young Adults and Prime Access memberships.
The second act
For Amazon, this is a return, and the company has been here before — twice, in fact, with two different endings. Amazon Restaurants launched in Seattle in 2015 and expanded to more than 20 American cities and London, offering Prime members delivery from local restaurants. Four years later it was gone: Amazon announced the shutdown on June 11, 2019, and the American service ended on June 24, with the London service already closed late the previous year and the Daily Dish workplace lunch service wound up alongside it. Weeks before the shutdown, Amazon had led a $575 million funding round for Deliveroo, the London-based delivery company. Uber, for its part, had listed Amazon as an Uber Eats competitor in its 2019 IPO filing.
The second ending arrived this week. Since 2022, Prime members had been offered a year of free Grubhub+ access, a perk that became a permanent part of Prime in 2024. That commercial agreement ends on Thursday, according to an Amazon spokesperson, and the Uber Eats deal takes its place. Members who had already activated Grubhub+ can keep using it through December 31, 2027. Amazon told GeekWire it had ended the Grubhub agreement after identifying “an opportunity to deliver an even better restaurant delivery experience.”
The Verge’s account of the new deal is blunt about why Amazon is renting rather than building this time: after shutting down its own service, the company concluded that partnering is cheaper than building a delivery network for perishable meals from scratch. The storefront stays Amazon’s. The driving is someone else’s.
What Uber gets from Uber Eats Prime delivery
On Uber’s side of the ledger, the prize is reach. The Verge describes the deal as giving Uber access to tens of millions of Amazon Prime shoppers who already love getting things delivered, without having to spend money running app store ads to win them over. Andrew Macdonald, Uber’s president and chief operating officer, put it this way: “Together with Amazon, we built an experience for Prime members designed to make restaurant delivery feel as natural, convenient, and affordable as ordering anything else on Uber Eats.”
That is the pitch. The catch is written into the structure of the deal itself. Amazon keeps the customer, the payment method, and the delivery alerts. Uber Eats supplies the restaurants and the couriers, and sends the receipt. A Prime member who has never bothered to sign up for Uber can now order takeout without ever becoming an Uber customer in any meaningful sense — no account, no app, no relationship beyond the food arriving. Uber gains orders; whether it gains loyal Uber users is a different question, and the deal as announced does not answer it.
The giant getting bigger
All of this is happening while Uber’s largest rival is getting larger. On October 29, DoorDash agreed to acquire Instacart for $65 a share, an equity value of about $17 billion and a 26% premium to Instacart’s closing price on October 22. At least 75% of the consideration will be cash, both boards have approved the deal, and the companies expect it to close in late 2027 or the first half of 2028, subject to an Instacart shareholder vote and regulatory approvals. The combined company would count more than 150,000 storefronts, with Instacart customers gaining access to 50,000 additional stores beyond the nearly 100,000 already on the platform, and the two companies plan a combined DashPass and Instacart+ membership. The deal is expected to draw a Federal Trade Commission review.
DoorDash announced the acquisition on the same day it reported third-quarter revenue of $4.62 billion, up 34% on a year earlier, with orders up 28% to 993 million. It completed its acquisition of Deliveroo in October 2025.
Distribution against scale
So the delivery wars have split into two different bets. DoorDash is buying scale, absorbing Instacart’s grocery delivery business. Uber is borrowing distribution, moving its service inside Amazon’s storefront — The Verge describes the deal as giving Uber access to tens of millions of Prime shoppers without app-store ad spend. One is a $17 billion acquisition that will take more than a year to close and must survive antitrust review. The other went live on the morning it was announced.
Which bet works depends on questions neither announcement answers. The commercial terms of the Amazon-Uber deal — the revenue split, who funds the $0 delivery fee — were not disclosed in any source reviewed. The $25 minimum shapes who the benefit is really for: an order below $25 does not qualify for this particular Prime fee waiver, and it is an open question whether Prime members who never used Uber will order often enough to change the market, or whether the deal mostly moves existing Uber Eats orders into Amazon’s checkout. And on the other side, a combined DoorDash and Instacart would still have to prove that scale lowers prices rather than raising them — with the deal expected to face Federal Trade Commission scrutiny.
What is certain is the shape of the fight. Amazon tried to own restaurant delivery and quit. It tried Grubhub and moved on. Now it is partnering with Uber, which in turn gains access to Amazon’s shoppers. DoorDash, meanwhile, is buying the grocery aisle. Everybody in this story is standing on someone else’s ground — and the only question left is whose ground turns out to be worth standing on.
