Amazon customers will be able to take advantage of the e-commerce giant’s new Fresh delivery service by the end of the month. According to the Guardian, the service aims to offer a range of groceries to be ordered online.

Although an official launch date has yet to be confirmed, May 18th is being cited by some of the retailer’s partners as being the first day on which Amazon Fresh will be available.

A small scale trial of the service has been running in London over the past few weeks, although since Amazon Fresh has been operating in the US since 2009, it is not an area that is entirely new to the company.

Buying food items through Amazon has been possible in the UK for a long time, although frozen products only arrived via Prime Now in 2015 and Amazon Pantry made certain groceries and household products available shortly afterwards.

The idea behind Fresh is that this will tie in all of these areas, along with consumables that need to be used within a far shorter period, including things like milk, vegetables and meat products.

This is good news for people who regularly use Amazon to carry out safe shopping online and would like to keep all of their e-commerce eggs in one basket, but bad news for supermarkets and other grocery delivery services.

The threat of Amazon’s arrival on the grocery delivery scene has not been taken lightly; Sainsbury’s announced its intention to work with Argos to improve its own e-commerce offering and the growing availability of click and collect services is helping rivals keep pace.

Meanwhile, Tesco is hoping to secure its place at the top of the grocery delivery market with ongoing investment in improving its infrastructure, lowering product prices and keeping customers loyal.