Recently, Amazon launched a brand new marketplace for local businesses, called Amazon Home Services, which is a new marketplace meant for local businesses to sell professional services to customers.In a nutshell, this new service allows customers to purchase and schedule professional services, such as plumbers, landscapers and the like.
This new service simply adds a whole new branch to an already huge company that offers one of the largest shopping opportunities for consumers online. This gives the same consumers even more options. Not only can they purchase products that will be shipped directly to their homes, but now they can purchase services for their homes as well.
based on data provided by ERSI, over $600 billion was spent by consumers on local services providers in 2014, which included housekeeping services, landscaping, among others. That’s a lot of money that’s simply being left on the table if Amazon decided against their new Home Services program. Basically, the market is there, and the market is huge. And Amazon is good and ready to take their piece of the pie.
With as large as Amazon is, Amazon Home Services could certainly be a problem for other businesses like Yelp. Amazon isn’t going to charge an annual membership fee to utilize the service. Not only that, Amazon isn’t going to be relying on advertising to account for most of its revenue.
So what does this mean for local businesses? Chris Marentis is here to lay it all down for us. In his post on Marketing Land, Chris talks about the new professional services marketplace, and even helps explain how it’ll work. Plus, he will tell us what the implications are for local business. Check out the link below to dig into the meat of this new development.
Marketing Land: What Amazon’s Entry Into The Home Services Business Means For Local Marketing