Amazon wants to sell you a new flatscreen TV on Black Friday, and then help you mount it on your wall.
Amazon Promotes Handyman and Installation Services
They will come to your house!
Shutterstock/Minerva Studio
Jason Del Rey has been a business journalist for 15 years and has covered Amazon, Walmart, and the e-commerce industry for the last decade. He was a senior correspondent at Vox.
The giant online marketplace has begun advertising services such as TV wall mountings and fan installations from local service providers alongside its product listings, according to search results on Amazon.com this evening. The services are being offered by companies that are taking part in a new offering called Amazon Local Services, which Reuters and the Wall Street Journal previously reported on.
This new initiative shows Amazon’s ambition to become the marketplace for all commerce transactions, whether the purchase of a product or service. The new business could also serve as a way for Amazon to boost its profit margins, since the listings are not associated with products that Amazon needs to store or deliver.
Amazon promotes the service provider listings, which are live in select cities in nine states, when shoppers enter search phrases such as “ceiling fans” or “TV mounts.” Here’s one example:
Clicking on the Shop Now button shown above takes shoppers to a page with names, price quotes and reviews for local service providers. The listings, shown below, also display a company’s overall rating on Yelp, though shoppers need to click through to Yelp to read reviews.
Amazon will take a 20 percent cut of services that cost $1,000 or less and 15 percent for services that cost more than $1,000, according to information on its website. The information mentions that a monthly subscription fee for sellers will be waived through the end of June, 2015. Amazon also says businesses must pass background checks, and in-home service providers must pass a personal background check. Licensing and insurance are required, too.
While I only viewed listings for installation and TV mounting professionals, photos and a video on Amazon’s website indicate that the marketplace will eventually include listings from service providers as varied as auto mechanics, music teachers and yoga instructors.
Update: On Tuesday, Amazon unveiled a landing page dedicated to its new business that organizes the local services into categories and makes them searchable.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
See More:
