Amazon Is Back in the Takeout Business — This Time, Uber Is Doing the Driving

Amazon quit restaurant delivery twice. Now it's back — by renting someone else's drivers and keeping the customer for itself.

Prime members can now order Uber Eats takeout inside Amazon, with $0 delivery on orders of $25 or more, no Uber account required. The storefront is Amazon's. The couriers are Uber's. And the deal went live the morning it was announced — while DoorDash's $17 billion Instacart buy still has a year of antitrust review ahead of it.

The storefront stays Amazon's. The driving is someone else's.

This is Amazon's third act in food delivery, and the company learned the expensive lesson twice: Amazon Restaurants launched in 2015, shut down in 2019. The Grubhub+ perk that replaced it ends today. This time Amazon isn't building a fleet — The Verge is blunt about it: partnering is cheaper than building a perishable-meals network from scratch. Amazon keeps the customer, the payment method, and the delivery alerts. Uber supplies the restaurants and the couriers — and sends the receipt.

Uber gets orders. Does it get customers?

That's the catch baked into the deal's structure. A Prime member who never signed 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 tens of millions of Prime shoppers without app-store ad spend. Whether any of them become Uber users is a question the announcement doesn't answer, and the answer matters a lot more than the order count.

Two opposite bets, one delivery war

DoorDash is buying scale — $17 billion for Instacart, 150,000-plus combined storefronts, a merged DashPass/Instacart+ membership, FTC review pending. Uber is borrowing distribution, moving its service inside Amazon's checkout. One bet takes over a year to close and has to survive regulators. The other was live before lunch.

And the terms that would tell you who's really winning — the revenue split, who funds the $0 delivery fee — weren't disclosed at all.