Reviewing Amazon Fresh – North East England, Amazon Prime Benefits
I am a big fan of grocery home deliveries – I couldn’t live without them! The thought of struggling with a baby, shopping list, reusable bags and a trolley brings a sad little tear to my eye. No thank you, not today Satan. I would much rather sit in my pyjamas on an evening to order my shopping – I can even walk to the kitchen and double check what we’ve got/need if I want to. Then I can have my order dropped at my doorstep at a convenient time. Hands down, love it.
But my pretties, all is not well in the online grocery world. Due to the demand that came from lockdown, the prices of delivery slots have risen quite a bit and some can be £4 plus which is a lot to pay out every week. A leaflet through our door introduced me to Amazon shopping and I saw that they were providing two different grocery services with free same day delivery if you spend over £40 if you have an Amazon Prime membership. Our shop is almost always over £40 now as Holly’s baby milk is £11.50 a pot so this sounded perfect to me.
So to clarify, Amazon provide two services: Amazon Morrisons and Amazon Fresh. Not sure why there are two but they offer the same free delivery options. I’m reviewing Amazon Fresh in this post however I will write a little bit about Amazon Morrisons at the end. **Please note that this review is for service in Durham, North East England so the availability and delivery options may differ in your area**
I’ve scored the service out of five in five categories below – these are the main things I would want to know so I hope they are useful for you too. Don’t have Prime? Sign up here*.
Pricing – 4/5. I found the prices to be very similar to what I would pay at Asda and even some things matched the Lidl prices
Product Quality – 4/5. No issues with quality at all. I’ve tried all of the ‘Amazon’ branded products such as milk and chicken and the quality is comparable with other supermarkets like Asda and Morrisons
Choice – 3/5. It had most things I needed but there weren’t many options for baby food or household things like kitchen roll and toilet paper. I guess that’s why it’s called Amazon Fresh as it’s mainly fresh food items. Something worth mentioning is that some of the items were branded as Morrisons products and some were Amazon (see picture of chicken kievs and chicken thighs below). It doesn’t make any difference to me but this might matter to you. Also some of the salad and veg were branded by companies I’ve never heard of (see picture of little gem lettuce below) but again, not a problem for me.
Ordering Process – 3/5. It wasn’t as nice to navigate as other retailers such as Asda, Morrison or Iceland. I’m guessing this is to do with the structure of the main Amazon website and maybe they can’t change it without creating a whole new website domain?
Delivery – 5/5. When you pick a delivery slot, it tells if you the items you need are available for that time. For example, one of my items would have been unavailable if I had picked the 9am delivery slot but 100% of items were available at the 12pm slot. This avoids substitutes I suppose. The products are delivered in brown paper bags so hand over from the driver is very quick and painless – no messing on with loose products in baskets while the delivery guy stands and waits. It’s delivered by a standard delivery driver not a refrigerated van and as you can see from my photos, everything was brought in brown recyclable bags. Top marks because same day delivery is in itself, fantastic, but unbelievable that it’s free!
All in all, I would definitely use it again but it’s not a one-stop-shop solution for my groceries as it doesn’t have everything I need. You could use the regular Amazon site for things like kitchen roll if you really wanted but I will probably alternate between this and Asda as my main food shopping websites. Read more about Amazon Fresh here.
With regards to Amazon Morrisons, I have also tried this but found it was not as good as Fresh. The choice of products does not match Morrisons’ own website and like I’ve said about Amazon Fresh, it’s not that user friendly. I also found the products to be more expensive than to buy direct from Morrisons – I had the Morrisons website open at the time of ordering to compare products – equally there were one or two products that were slightly cheaper but not many. Delivery was very much the same but it didn’t show me product availability like with Fresh so not sure what would happen with substitutes as you can’t hand anything back to the driver. I’d rather go direct to Morrisons in this instance as I feel the free delivery is devalued by the higher prices. Read more about Amazon Morrisons here.
So there you have it, Amazon Fresh is a winner in my opinion but don’t discard your favourite supermarket just yet!
I hope you enjoyed this ‘Amazon Fresh Review’ and watch out for a post on the benefits of Amazon Prime and how to maximise your usage of it which is coming soon.
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