Amazon introduces one hour delivery with Amazon Prime Now

Service has opened in New York and is coming to more places in 2015

Amazon marks busiest ever online shopping day on Black Friday 2014 ( Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

Amazon has deployed a small army of delivery people to allow users to receive items just an hour after ordering them.

The service isn’t available for all items — the delivery people will bring what Amazon calls daily essentials, which is mostly food and other sundries like batteries, but it will also be available for books and other small items.

If users are a member of a Prime, they can get free delivery in two hours or pay $7.99 to have their items arrive in an hour. The service is available from 6am to midnight, seven days a week.

Amazon says that the service is currently available in “parts of Manhattan” — actually only in the 10001 postcode, the small area that contains Penn Station and the Empire State Building — but that it will be “coming soon to a city near you”.

Dave Clark, Amazon’s senior vice president of worldwide operations, said that the service is going to be rolled out “to additional cities in 2015”.

Amazon has been looking to increase the options in its Prime offering — which is run in the UK too, and here features next day delivery as well as access to its streaming TV service.