Amazon Groceries Review: Delivery Fees, Date Codes and Who You Are Buying From

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Prime members pay nothing to have fresh groceries delivered the same day on an Amazon order over £20, and everyone else pays £5.99 whatever the basket is worth. Those are Amazon's own figures, published on 4 June 2026 and checked on 26 September 2026. Behind them sits a grocery range Amazon puts at more than two million lines, delivered in one-hour windows, and a category the company says now accounts for roughly one in every three units sold on Amazon.co.uk.

What you are actually shopping is five shops in one search box. Amazon Fresh is Amazon's own range, and alongside it sit Morrisons, Iceland, Co-op and Gopuff, each selling as itself. That matters more than it sounds, because the contract for a Morrisons basket is with WM Morrison Supermarkets PLC of Hilmore House, Bradford, company number 358949, and an Iceland basket is with Iceland Foods Ltd of Deeside, company number 01107406. Amazon publishes all four entities, with company numbers, VAT numbers and telephone numbers, which is more than most marketplaces bother to do — and it decides which number you ring when a delivery goes wrong.

The shops themselves have gone. On 23 September 2025 Amazon set out a proposal to close all 14 of its Amazon Fresh stores in the UK, with five of them converting to Whole Foods Market by the end of 2026. Anyone searching for an Amazon grocery shop to walk into, or for click-and-collect from one, is looking for something that no longer exists; this is a delivery business now.

Five per cent on a tin of beans, and no floor under it

Amazon's published referral fee for Grocery and Gourmet is 5% on any item priced up to £10 and 15% above it, and the minimum referral fee is recorded as not applicable. Read that second half carefully, because almost nothing else on Amazon's fee schedule works that way. Pet Supplies is a flat 15% with a 25p minimum. Beauty, Health and Personal Care is 8% up to £10 and 15% above, again with a 25p minimum. Home Products is 8% at or below £20 and 15% above, with the same 25p floor.

On an 89p tin, 5% is 4p. If the 25p minimum applied, Amazon would be taking 28% of the sale, and nobody would list it. Removing the floor is the single decision that makes a cheap grocery line worth putting on the site at all, and it explains why the range runs to millions of items rather than the few thousand a delivery-only grocer normally carries. It also explains the shape of what you find: the depth is in ambient and household goods, where a seller keeps 95p in the pound, rather than in the fresh food the category is named after.

Selling costs sit on top. A Professional selling plan is £25 a month excluding VAT, or 75p an item on the Individual plan. For a seller shifting 400 jars of sauce a month, the plan is 6p a jar; for someone shifting twelve, it is more than £2 each, which is the arithmetic behind a marketplace grocery listing priced oddly high.

The date on the packet is the one thing the law lets them leave off

Buy food in a shop and the label is in your hand before you pay. Buy it online and the law splits the label in two. Article 9(1) of assimilated Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011 lists twelve mandatory particulars, from (a) the name of the food and (b) the list of ingredients through to (l) the nutrition declaration. Article 14, the distance selling article, requires all of them to be available before the purchase is concluded, free of charge — with one exception, point (f), the date of minimum durability or the 'use by' date. That one need only be available at the moment of delivery.

So an online grocer is under no obligation to tell you how much life is left on the chicken before you pay for it, and a legal obligation to tell you when it arrives. The enforcement sits in the Food Information Regulations 2014 and the Food Safety Act 1990, policed by local authority Trading Standards rather than by any financial regulator.

The distinction between the two dates is worth knowing before the box is open. A use-by date goes on highly perishable food, and it is an offence to sell or offer for sale food after it — after midnight on the stated day, that item cannot lawfully be sold. Best before is a quality marker: the food may still be sold and eaten after it, and the retailer carries the responsibility for its condition if it is. Fresh fruit and vegetables that have not been peeled or cut carry no date mark at all, along with vinegar, cooking salt, solid sugar confectionery and chewing gum.

There is one thing to do on the doorstep, and it takes ten seconds. Read the dates on the chilled items while the driver is still there, because that is the moment the law gives you the information, and the mandatory particulars have to be legible when they reach you: the minimum x-height for the text is 1.2mm, dropping to 0.9mm only where the largest surface of the pack is under 80cm².

Two Amazon pages, two free-delivery thresholds, four days apart

Amazon's own pages do not agree on what free grocery delivery costs, and both were current within the same week. The newsroom announcement of 4 June 2026, which launched fresh groceries inside an ordinary Same-Day order in parts of central and east London, gives free delivery for Prime members on orders over £20 and £5.99 for non-members regardless of basket size. Amazon's Prime membership page, last modified on 31 May 2026, gives Prime members free two-hour deliveries on Amazon Fresh orders above £60.

Both are true, because they are different services: one is a dedicated Amazon Fresh slot, the other is fresh food dropped into the same basket as everything else. The practical point for a shopper is that the number depends on which route you happen to be in, and the help pages add that temporary promotions on delivery fees are not shown, so the fee is not something you can establish in advance. Assume you will see it at checkout and check it there.

The free delivery is also priced in elsewhere. Prime is £8.99 a month or £95 a year, with an 18-to-24 student rate of £4.49 a month or £47.49 a year. At £5.99 a delivery, sixteen grocery orders a year come to £95.84 — so if groceries are the only reason to hold Prime, the membership starts paying for itself at roughly one delivery every three weeks, and below that it does not.

8°C, and what happens when the bag arrives warm

Chilled food in England is governed by Schedule 4 of the Food Safety and Hygiene (England) Regulations 2013, SI 2013/2996. Paragraph 2 is blunt: a person who keeps food that needs temperature control at a temperature above 8°C commits an offence. There are tolerances — a period of less than four hours for service or display, and limited periods for unavoidable transfer — and general exemptions for food that is safe at ambient temperature throughout its shelf life, for canned and dehydrated goods before opening, and for cooked food held at or above 63°C.

Amazon says perishable items are stored, picked and packed in temperature-controlled conditions with checks at several points, and that temperature-sensitive products travel in insulated, recyclable packaging under a freshness guarantee. The delivery mechanics carry the rest of the answer. Unattended delivery, where the driver leaves the order without you, is available on Amazon Fresh only, for orders under £500, and is not available at all for chilled, frozen or age-restricted items — which is the right rule, and it means a chilled grocery order is an appointment rather than a drop-off.

If something arrives spilled or damaged, you have seven days from delivery to report it through Your Orders, and Amazon states it will not ask for the item back. Amazon Fresh purchases are refundable within 30 days, though the returns policy is explicit that most Fresh food is not returnable — perishables and goods that deteriorate or expire rapidly are excluded outright, as are items unsuitable for return on hygiene grounds once unsealed. On a grocery order, the remedy is a refund and nothing else.

Since 6 April 2026 the price per 100g has had to be there too

The rule that lets you compare a 400g jar with a 680g jar changed this spring, and it is the most useful change to grocery pricing law in twenty years. The Price Marking (Amendment) Order 2024, SI 2024/1055, was made on 21 October 2024. The Price Marking (Amendment) Order 2025, SI 2025/592, made on 14 May 2025, pushed its commencement from 1 October 2025 to 6 April 2026. Two changes matter to anyone filling an online basket: a new Article 7A requires a trader offering a product at more than one price — a loyalty price and a shelf price, say — to show each selling price and each unit price together with the conditions for getting them; and the amendment to Article 9 requires a price reduction to show the reduced selling price and the reduced unit price.

That was written because the old rules were not working. The Competition and Markets Authority reviewed unit pricing across the sector in July 2023, covering 11 nationwide supermarkets and 7 variety store retailers, visiting 22 supermarket and 24 variety stores and analysing more than 4,000 photographs of shelf labels. The supermarkets came out of it reasonably well, with one or two isolated errors each; the variety stores did not, and the CMA's worst example was a 250ml handwash priced at £1.19 and unit priced at £476.00 per 100ml. The review also recorded that the same product could be unit priced per litre in one shop, per 100ml in the next and per wash in a third, and noted that by December 2022 an estimated 94% of UK shoppers belonged to at least one loyalty scheme — which is why a promotional price with no unit price attached had become a hole worth closing.

Use it. On a multi-seller listing the pack sizes rarely match, and the unit price is the only number that survives the comparison.

What Amazon's own suppliers report, and the investigation that is still open

Amazon is a designated retailer under the groceries code, and it did not volunteer. The Competition and Markets Authority designated Amazon.com, Incorporated on 9 February 2022 under Article 4(1)(b) of the Groceries (Supply Chain Practices) Market Investigation Order 2009, which catches any retailer whose UK grocery retail turnover exceeds £1 billion. The obligations began on 1 March 2022, and the practical effect is that Amazon's dealings with its direct grocery suppliers are measured every year by the Groceries Code Adjudicator against the same yardstick as Tesco's and Waitrose's.

It measures badly. In the GCA's 2026 annual survey, conducted by YouGov and published on 16 April 2026, the proportion of direct suppliers saying a retailer consistently or mostly complies with the code put Waitrose top on 97.8% and Amazon bottom of all 14 designated retailers on 68.6% — a gap of 29 percentage points, with Co-op the next lowest on 89.1% and the rest of the field between 90% and 97%. Amazon accounted for 11.2% of the retailer mentions when suppliers were asked which retailer their issue concerned, and 52% of direct suppliers reported an issue of some kind, up from 51%. It is an improvement on 2024, when 3,000-plus responses gathered between 15 January and 25 February put Amazon on 47% against Co-op's 98% and the then Adjudicator, Mark White, said that the survey showed clearly that many suppliers did not believe Amazon was complying with the code.

On 20 June 2025 the GCA went further and opened a formal investigation into Amazon under the Groceries Code Adjudicator Act 2013, on reasonable grounds to suspect breaches of paragraph 5 of the code, No delay in Payments, which requires a retailer to pay a supplier within a reasonable time of the invoice. The investigation covers 1 March 2022 to 20 June 2025 with particular attention to the period since 1 January 2024, and examines Amazon's goods receipt and payment processes, how it handles supplier concerns, and its use of settlement deductions in commercial negotiations. Mark White's stated reason was that the alleged delays could expose Amazon's suppliers to excessive risk and unexpected costs, affecting their ability to invest and innovate. The call for evidence closed on 8 August 2025 and the investigation was still open as at the GCA's annual report of 16 July 2026.

Be fair about what this is and is not. The code protects suppliers, not shoppers, and nothing in it says a delivery will arrive cold or on time. It is still the only independent, annual, published measurement of how a grocery retailer behaves, and on that measurement Amazon has been last every year it has been measured.

Five shops, five contracts, and nobody to appeal to

Mixing Amazon Fresh items with ordinary Amazon items splits your shopping into separate baskets with separate checkouts and separate order confirmations, and the same is true across the partner merchants. That is a mechanical nuisance rather than a scandal, but it has a consequence worth knowing before something goes wrong: each order sits with a different company. Co-op orders are with Co-operative Group Food Limited, 1 Angel Square, Manchester, customer services 0800 068 6727. Morrisons is WM Morrison Supermarkets PLC on 0345 611 6111. Iceland is Iceland Foods Ltd on 0800 328 0800. Gopuff is GoBrands UK Holdings Ltd, company number 12793914, contactable only by email.

There is no ombudsman above any of them. A grocery order is not a regulated financial product, so there is no Financial Ombudsman Service to escalate to and no compulsory alternative dispute resolution scheme covering food retail. If a refund is refused, the routes are the merchant's own complaints process, then the local authority — Trading Standards for labelling and pricing, environmental health for temperature and hygiene — and then the small claims track. That is worth knowing in advance precisely because Amazon's own service is usually quick: the escalation path behind it is short.

Coverage is the other limit. Amazon's grocery partners are postcode-by-postcode rather than national, and the target Amazon has set itself is that more than 80% of UK Prime members will have access to at least one grocery partner by the end of 2026 — a target, not a present state. The Iceland tie-up reached Belfast, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Nottingham on 11 February 2026, having started in selected Greater Manchester postcodes; Gopuff and Co-op are narrower still. Check your own postcode before assuming any of the figures on this page apply to you.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 26 September 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.