Amazon Launches Home Services Operation

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) will help consumers clean, install electronics devices and take out the garbage. It is hard to imagine why Amazon would bother because this service is nearly lost in a sea of other initiatives. Like its effort in drones, the huge e-commerce company has decided to thrown a number of things at a wall and hope some will stick.

According to management, referring to the new initiative:

Amazon Home Services (www.amazon.com/services), a new marketplace for on-demand professional services. In less than 60 seconds, customers can now browse, purchase and schedule hundreds of professional services from wall mounting a new TV to installing a new garbage disposal to house cleaning, directly on Amazon.com. Amazon Home Services features handpicked pros offering upfront pricing on pre-packaged services with helpful reviews from customers that have made verified purchases. Amazon’s Happiness Guarantee backs all service purchases, so customers know the job will get done right. With this expansion beyond physical and digital goods, Amazon is now making purchasing professional services as easy as buying products. Amazon Home Services is now available across the country in major U.S. metropolitan areas including New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle.

ALSO READ: Can Wal-Mart Compete With Amazon in Drone Delivery?

Amazon will help vet the suppliers of these services, aid in setting prices and monitor reviews of the new home services legions.

Amazon has added the service along with its one-hour delivery operations, which currently are available in New York City, Baltimore and Miami. One-hour delivery has to be a logistics and price nightmare, but Amazon believes the enterprise will help it gain an additional toehold with customers. Home services has to be meant to do the same.

Amazon may face the barrier of what is enough, and when enough is enough. Jeff Bezos, its founder, has stated its cloud services may be as large as its e-commerce operation someday. It is, however, besieged by competition from every major tech company around the world. Amazon has pegged a new program to help it in this sector. Amazon Cloud Drive will offer unlimited storage. Although the cost of storage infrastructure has fallen over the years, the plan has to cost Amazon something. The cost might be offset by making customers more loyal, but it is a risky business.

Home services is a risky business, too. Amazon’s famous appetite for risk in the name of getting and holding customers has not abated.

ALSO READ: 5 Top Cloud Storage Tech Stocks to Buy Now

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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