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Amazon has launched Amazon Now in Egypt, its fastest delivery service to date, bringing fresh groceries, household essentials and consumer electronics to customers within 20 minutes across select areas of Cairo, Giza, Alexandria and the North Coast.
Orders carry a flat EGP 25 delivery fee, waived for Prime members on baskets above EGP 150, with Prime priced at EGP 29 a month, an economics designed to make the membership pay for itself in under two orders. The service runs on a network of dark stores stocked close to customers, with deliveries handled through Amazon's Delivery Service Partner model of independent local operators.
"By operating closer to our customers, we are able to achieve this speed, and this is just the beginning," said Omar Elsahy, Amazon Egypt's general manager, adding that the company is using AI to forecast grocery and fresh-food demand as the operation scales.
The launch replicates the playbook Amazon has run across the Gulf, where Amazon Now debuted in the UAE in late 2024 before expanding into Saudi Arabia, embedding quick commerce inside the main Amazon app rather than launching a standalone product, and using Prime as the retention flywheel.
Egypt becomes the third market in the region to get the model, in a country where online retail still accounts for only around 4% of total retail sales, against more than 10% in mature markets, per Elsahy.
Amazon arrives into a category with entrenched local competition. Talabat introduced Egypt to quick commerce when it launched talabat mart's dark stores in March 2021, and has just made its biggest infrastructure commitment to the market yet, inaugurating MENA's largest quick-commerce fulfilment centre in April, a 27,000 sqm AI-powered hub, designed to process up to one million items a day and currently supplying 100% of talabat mart's operations across 12 Egyptian cities, with expansion to 17 planned.
"This centre represents a strategic milestone toward a more efficient and sustainable future for talabat mart in Egypt and the region," said Mohamed Sekkina, the unit's general manager, at the facility's unveiling.
The homegrown players have been scaling too. Breadfast, the Cairo-born platform that has built its model on owning the full stack from private-label production to last-mile delivery, raised a $50 million pre-Series C in February from backers including SBI Investment, the IFC, the EBRD and Saudi Arabia's Olayan Financing Company, at a valuation reported around $400 million, ahead of a larger Series C and an eventual public listing.
Rabbit, which pioneered 15-minute delivery in Cairo and counts more than 1.4 million customers and 40 million items delivered, expanded into Riyadh in 2025 before exiting the Kingdom to refocus on Egypt.
Keeta, the international arm of China's Meituan that has been rolling across Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Kuwait, is widely expected to enter Egypt next, which would put a fourth heavily capitalised player into a market where the fundamental bet is the same for all of them, converting one of the region's largest, youngest and most cash-based grocery markets into an online habit.
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