Amazon’s in a number of different markets, offering goods, music downloads, TV shows and movies, cloud storage, and more. And now it’s expanding into services.
Amazon Home Services is a new Amazon store that lets you easily buy services like plumbing, gutter cleaning, car stereo installation, TV wall mounting, voice lessons, and goat grazing service. Yep, goats. The services are performed by professionals in your area, and Amazon performs a number of checks on the pros, including background checks and insurance requirements.
When you decide to order a service, you can check to see which ones are offered in your area. Amazon’s got a map that shows the quantity of services that are available in different parts of the U.S., and as of this writing, four cities currently have a “high” number of services available: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. There are quite a few “medium” and “light” areas, though; I’m in a light area and I’ve got a handful of services available for purchase, but most only have one professional for each.
Once you select which service you’d like to have performed, you select details to get your estimated price. For example, for TV Wall Mounting, you tell Amazon how large your TV is, if you’ve got a mounting bracket, and whether you’d like the cords concealed by a cover your inside your wall. You then click “Add to Cart” and select your preferred appointment time. Amazon says that the professional performing your service will reach out to confirm your appointment.
Amazon Home Services hopes to take the pain out of finding someone good to perform services around your house by eliminating the need to hunt down reputable companies, contact them for estimates, and so on. Obviously the service offerings are going to be a bit limited for most of us out of the gate since Amazon can’t exactly ship a professional using Prime, and so it’ll be interesting to see how quickly it increases its service offerings in the “medium” and “light” areas on its map.