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Amazon Launches 'Home Services' For Repair, Installation, and Other Work
An anonymous reader writes: Amazon has quietly rolled out a new business called "Home Services," which aims to be a middleman between customers and all sorts of contracted services. It includes things like appliance repair, home cleaning, installation/assembly of products in your car or home, tutoring (academic and musical), and even performance art. Amazon makes money on this by taking a cut of the total price — between 10 and 20 percent. Since everything is geolocated, they have many more options available in big cities than in small rural communities. One of Amazon's goals is to help standardize the price for various services, so there aren't any surprises when the bill comes due.
They'll require providers to sign a non-compete preventing them from taking business from any other source...
Sears tried something like this years ago. Except it mostly dealt with connecting contractors to customers who purchased the products sold for installation. They ran into a lot of legal problems. Some areas considered them to be contractors themselves so they needed to be licensed and bonded. Some areas considered them liable for disputes that popped up. They got a handle on it but not before some headaches. Amazon will find this out too.
Does it matter? I'd think Amazon will be happy to grab a percentage on as many of them as they can. 20% of 50% of transactions > 20% of 0% of transactions.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Yeah, my experience is that anyone remotely competent is booked forever, while those you can get are all too weighted to the blithering idiot side of the scale. It has inspired me to do my own work, in which I have learned a lot, and realized that I am also somewhat incompetent (but less so than many others, and cheaper, if also much slower).
And so it goes.
Yet another step to insert a system to mediate and "facilitate" peer-to-peer transactions. I can almost feel the middle class getting poorer as more and more middlemen scrape off their percentage.
The technology that so many people thought would set us free is being applied to bring us back 100 years when most labor was casual and few people knew if they'd have a job next year.
Car sharing, house sharing, "free" content generation, task rabbit type casual labor.... no wonder the middle class in the USA is hurting. This might be more effect than cause but we're in an undiscovered country, that's for sure.
Where else was I going to find a "Goat Grazing Service"?
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
I checked a bunch of categories and all I got was "We're sorry, no pros near ZIP xxxxx".
Maybe in the future there will be somebody nearby who can work on something for me. Until then I'll just get by the way I always have. I can live without Amazon's assistance.
The concept seems good - but unless they are adding a lot of value, all they are doing is providing the same service as Yellow Pages, with the possibility of reviews. Or am I missing something? The review concept would be useful, but that's about it, surely.
I think a 10-20% cut is bullshit. I'm really starting to hate Amazon almost, but not quite, as much as Apple.
I'd expect them to just do it by zip code...And there's always going to be edge cases.
I think it was Sears and, in fact, it appears to be active today. Although likely ignored by pretty much all.
Perhaps Amazon has more reach - it certainly has more cachet - but I don't see this as terribly effective. For one thing, standardized prices imply consistent quality. That might happen when you're making widgets. For labor with any degree of skill - I'm rather doubtful that this is the case.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Sorry, but Amazon took over the market by operating at a deficit for decades. I've heard that they are still operating at a deficit, which, if true, is frankly amazing. How *do* they stay in business.
When most companies use this policy (pricing below the cost of service) the governments put them out of business. Somehow Amazon is allowed to "prosper". (I'm not sure that proper is the right term if they're actually still operating at a deficit. I know they did for over a decade, as there used to be many financial people commenting about it.)
they aren't operating at a deficit per say they make lots of money but they reinvest all of their profits back in to r&d, infrastructure, and expanding into new areas, so they make no net profit but aren't exactly at a loss either.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
I like being able to see reviews from Amazon customers with "verified purchase" next to their names, means much more than random comments online.
Yelp and etc.
Yeah, but with Yelp you just pay them a small advertising fee and all the bad reviews magically go away.
I find a wonderful sense of schadenfreude every time I consider that Sears shut down their catalog sales only two years before Amazon launched.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....