Today Amazon officially announced Amazon Home Services, a marketplace where customers can request repair work and personal lessons from service providers in their area. The concept is like TaskRabbit—services are provided by individual contractors, not Amazon, but those contractors are rated by customers and vetted by the online shopping behemoth. All services provided are backed by Amazon.
Services include banal things like assembling a bed (from $57 to $140), installing a garbage disposal ($149 to $200), setting up a wireless printer ($84 to $210), or “computer software configuration” ($120 to $210). The value proposition for Amazon Home Services is that people don't have to call around to find a contractor and then get a quote from them—the price is listed up front. For a custom job, you'll get a quote delivered to you after you specify the details of the job.
You can also find more whimsical things on Amazon Home Services, like drum lessons or “goat grazers”—sadly there were no master drummers or goats for hire in my area. With drum lessons (or math lessons or French lessons, all of which are listed on Amazon's website now) buyers can get a free trial lesson and then pay for a package of further instruction through the site. If you're hiring a goat, the price will depend on how much backyard you need it to eat.
(“Goats can eat thistle, blackberry, English Ivy, kudzu, poison ivy, poison sumac, poison oak, wisteria, various grasses, and more,” Amazon's information page on that service helpfully offers. The online marketplace revolution is about to disrupt goat diets forever!)
Still, the services vary by location (good luck getting anything done in Idaho) and getting the job done is not always as easy as you might imagine. The cheapest service I could find in my area was getting windshield wipers replaced ($15 if you provide your own wiper blades). I selected that service, hoping that a team of underemployed teens/drones would descend on my vehicle within the hour. I was disappointed to learn that, despite the "Home Services" moniker, I could only get the service if I took my car in to a nearby shop—even then, I couldn't get an appointment until Wednesday. Sorry, but I can replace my own wiper blades, after all.
Some services, like “virus and spyware removal,” will give you the option of coming in to a store that provides the service or tacking on an extra $30 to get someone to do it in your home. That makes Amazon's computer repair services not unlike Best Buy's Geek Squad, which has been running a similar business model for at least a decade.
I also checked out the Amazon Home Services page for tire installation. Obviously that's a service that would be best done in a garage, but the Amazon listing didn't offer the name of the company providing the service, so I searched for the address of the place I'd have to take my car to, and it came up with SpeeDee Oil Change & Auto Service in Redwood City. I contacted the owner of SpeeDee, Arun Nageal, and he said he was a part of Amazon Home Services' beta program and has had seven or eight new customers this year because of the listing on Amazon.
“I took over this business in September of last year, and I was looking at every possible way to grow my business,” Nageal said over the phone. “Amazon coincidentally approached me and said, 'would you be interested?'... It sounded like a good idea. I'm an Amazon user and a shopper,” he said.
He was a little bit skeptical at first, mostly because Amazon makes service providers list the fees for their services upfront. “It does make me a little bit nervous [to list prices on Amazon], but at the end of the day, you have to do pros and cons, and the con is people are going to know competitors' prices, but at the end of the day it's equally easy to just walk over to another shop and ask their price,” Nageal said.
He added that he wasn't sure what percentage Amazon was taking from transactions done over its new marketplace. “The reason I need to check is I also have something with a Groupon; sometimes it's a little muddy.”
Amazon has been looking to expand into home services for quite some time, but now that its market has launched, the featured services seem a little slim. Babysitting is not on the list, for example, although it was rumored to be one of the first things offered.
Of course, Amazon takes a cut. (The company isn't offering details, but The Verge says a beta version of Amazon Home Services' website showed Amazon taking 20 percent on standard services, 15 percent on custom, and 10 percent on recurring services). It's safe to assume that the money for Amazon is in installation jobs, where a person comes out once to set up one physical object, ideally also purchased on Amazon.
Once you find a babysitter or drum teacher you like on Amazon Home Services, there's less of a drive to keep paying through Amazon if the company is taking a cut. If you really love your drum teacher, you'll pay her under the table and let her keep the extra 10 percent.
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