Amazon Ramps Up Local Services Offering

The eCommerce company’s on-demand services marketplace, Amazon Home Services, has expanded the number of providers and services offered across 15 new metropolitan areas.

Amazon Home Services now includes over 15 million unique services across more than 900 professional categories, Amazon announced yesterday (July 22) in a company release.

“Amazon Home Services makes buying a service as easy as buying a product on Amazon,” Nish Lathia, Amazon Home Services GM, said in a statement. “We are excited to expand our offers and availability across the country, providing customers with a quick and simple way to purchase services and service pros with a trusted and familiar marketplace to reach local customers. We’re also excited to see the growth in custom service requests with completed projects ranging from central air installation to home entertainment setup.”

The service will now be available in the following cities: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Miami, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, San Jose and Washington, D.C., while also adding to existing availability in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle. Amazon Home Services features two ways for customers to shop, by either custom or pre-packaged services.

Custom services allow users to create and request a service via text and photos used to describe what needs to be done. The requests can then be submitted to local professionals who will provide estimates for the work.

Alternatively, customers can select a pre-packaged service, which includes requests such as faucet replacements and TV wall mounting.

According to Amazon, its Home Services offering has seen the number of applications from service professionals quadruple since re-launching back in March. The company also noted that 92 percent of surveyed customers said they would recommend the service to a friend.

The earlier version of Amazon Home Services, which launched in 2014, offered services related to specific products that were sold on Amazon.com. The refurbished marketplace, however, did away with that caveat, instead offering a wider range of professional services in and of themselves, pitting Amazon Home Services directly against competitors like Craigslist, Groupon and Angie’s List

While Amazon continues its growth within the on-demand services world, it may want to keep an eye on the aforementioned Angie’s List, which recently filed a federal lawsuit against the company in Indianapolis.

The lawsuit alleges executives and other employees at the company’s subsidiary, Amazon Local, signed up as Angie’s members in order to copy provider profiles, member reviews and other information to fuel the creation of a competing service.

Angie’s List spokeswoman Cheryl Reed released a brief statement about the lawsuit last month, telling The Indianapolis Star, “Angie’s List has spent more than 20 years developing our substantial database of proprietary information relating to home improvement service providers, consumer preferences and expectations, and industry standards across the country. This information is available to Angie’s List customers for personal use — not for other businesses to use for commercial gain. We welcome competition but on fair and legal grounds.”

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