Sell Services on Amazon
services.amazon.com
services.amazon.com
It's only a question of time.
When I was at Yell I wasn't that surprised to see how frequently such services would appear on our database, initially as massage and then moving on to ever stranger personal services (with the real service buried in the description or provided by a phone call later).
For example, what if there is a service that enables you to take your Amazon ratings to another platform but not have to pay the 20% cut. You can imagine the service providers would be willing to pay for the cost of verifications where their Amazon ratings is verified and transformed to platform B where it charges only 10% or 8% cut.
Other interesting angles would be around services and tools you can create to help the service providers market themselves better, engage their customers for reviews, return for repeat business, etc. Very exciting time!
(See http://www.wordstream.com/articles/most-expensive-keywords)
- For example, if you install car audio, your services would be listed alongside car audio components.
The real benefit for some, not much for others. iPad Repair can't benefit from iPad sales
- Amazon creates pre-defined scopes of work based on common customer requests which you are then able to pre-estimate and offer... Before a job begins, you can review a customer’s specific scope of work and process a change order if needed.
Isn't this too complex? Also, no mention of procedure if customer does not get satisfied by the service. But anyway, it's very interesting to see Amazon trying to standardize service business. It's too complex, I want them to show me how to do it.
On the second point, it looks significantly simpler, particularly from Amazon's standpoint, to start the capability only using predefined service offerings. Such commoditized services can be more easily and confidently associated with products, whereas open service offering definition would be significantly harder to support (leading to a poor user experience and adoption rate).
But Amazon's brand do benefit from this whole concept if executed well. And it's pretty hard to copy by competitors.
Also one of the big issues with buying amazon's stuff globally is the lack of warranty. Now if amazon decides that a certain product Y that is currently not bought in country X would be a good deal there, it could work with a lab to offer a repair service for it, and could guarantee promotion of said product, to make it worthwhile for the lab.
Assuming Amazon can manage this complex process well, this could become quite a big differentiation for the in many global markets.
Whether amazon cover the service with a guarantee or not, the killer feature will be the reviews. This could wipe out 'find a tradesman'-style web sites over night.
If Amazon provides leads but the service provider still does marketing, customer service, accounting, payments, sets prices, insures against fraud, closes the sales and so on, you'd expect Amazon's margin to be pretty slim as they're basically a telephone directory.
But if Amazon manages the customer relationship, does all the advertising and customer service, sets the prices, makes the final sale and all that, so the service provider just turns up to do the job, they could probably make a much better margin.
As they rightly point out in the benefits these aren't leads, they are closed sales.
It's high. They're not first to the scene. If you look at Elance, it's 8.75% for exactly the same thing including payment processing. On the high end, I've worked with agencies that charge 15% for everything. 20% is steep.
What is this? the 90's ? Anyone can set-up a simple free website and offer his services, of course a little bit of marketing and patience is still required, but for a smart man, that doesn't cost anything.
Amazon is the e-commerce juggernaut; Amazon.com is the 7th most popular website in the world. (4th in the U.S.)
The dominant player in a market sets the price. (apple & google play take 30%, uber & lyft take 20%, think amex/porsche/jetblue/nike...)
"Transaction fee includes all relevant fees for invoicing, payment processing, and fraud protection."
In some industries 20% is a money losing exercise.
They'll probably acquire more nuance eventually.
I wish they introduced the ability to have structured bids / sell orders for things like food delivery, and even transportation service.
Yes! That would be very interesting to see. If we could, sort of, commoditize a certain service (eg. transportation), and build a bid/ask order book for it (potential customers are bidders, and transportation services provide the asks).
The problem, as I see it, is defining the base unit. In order to have a unified order book, we need a base unit for this order book. What are we selling? Is "1 mile of transportation", or is it necessary to build different order books for different locations? I suspect most transportation service have a base fee plus a $/mile rate. So now you have two variables, and the price of "1 mile of transportation" will depend on the quantity of miles, which makes it a non-commodity (1 ton of iron ore in the spot market will cost roughly the same as 100 tonnes).
Besides, amazon.com has amazon fresh for the grocery delivery service needs. Why cut into their own business?
Do people really need to call someone out to oil a chain?
Not for common people (my idea was i.e. an accounting web service sold on amazon)
Interesting!
How does Amazon determine a company's availability when a customer books a job?
Most of these business I'd guess are probably in the 1-10 people range and probably not the most tech savvy. I can't imagine an adequate solution unless Amazon provides scheduling software and enforces adoption.
It looks like Amazon punted on the hard part by constraining the availability to only specific services.
On product reviews, I know some are juiced but I still look at Amazon reviews when examining something (and try to figure out which ones appear authentic). I imagine most people take these reviews at face value and reviews are worth a lot when having a service performed. I've never been on Angie's list but it seems a bit scammy from the little exposure I have had. Amazon likely appears more trustworthy, so I grudgingly predict success for this program.
In one sense it is high but in another it's not.
If you consider the amount of time it would take a typical contractor, say an electrician, to land a job if this comes in as more pre qualified business then the extra cost will save having to bid out and spend time on jobs that never pan out. People typically get prices from multiple sources. They don't always follow through on work that was quoted. If this type of work is "shovel ready" that's a great cost savings to the person doing the work. Not having to spend time on sales and marketing at least not as much as if they got calls from an advertisement. (Rating system means people have less doubt about using them).
Though I think they are trying to use their size to their advantage here. If they wanted to be really competitive 10% would be much more reasonable. 20% strongly motivates me to get new customers to work with me off the Amazon service to avoid that overhead.
Software and Design is probably too broad and not concretely defined enough, for what they are targeting.
Small businesses want to buy services like they buy apps and products online. We're building that. And it is difficult.
Mail me if it sounds interesting (especially designers and developers): me at daniel sim .co.uk
For the most part, it's still pretty hard to get good reviews for service businesses. It's even hard to get prices. How much does it cost to get a car painted?
My question is why would you pay online? It might turn out that for every sale that goes through amazon 3-4 clients just use this like yelp. Read review/prices and just pay the normal way.
Amazon has been with this for some time. Its a bit surprising that they've not launch in entirety. (Still looks like a sign up phase)
Seriously: Isn't this the inevitable conclusion to "x as a service"?
Pretty interesting pie is being cooked up in India. I wonder if their 1.2 billion $ attempt to buyout Jabong would go through or not.
This definitely smells like a attempt to draw in fresh startups/people with loose pockets. But it is not as bad, as I make it sound.
It happened this month with DVDs on Amazon. If you aren't a wholesaler or someone that sells a lot in bulk, you can no longer sell DVDs. so if you are a small seller and you build up your customer base over a view years, you now effectively have to start completely over. Still least eBay allows you to keep your customers and build an actual business.
Now with services, I'm not sure how they will enforce this. If you are meeting with the customer, you could easily just tell them to start purchasing from you directly (and avoid Amazon fees). But I suppose if Amazon saw you only getting 1-time customers, they might get suspicious.
Either way, I would steer clear of doing any business with Amazon, unless you are fine with the fact that you aren't building yourself a business. You are building up amazon's
But I think no one is focusing on the benefits to customers and not businesses. Amazon has historically been awesome for the consumer - bringing a high quality product at low prices. If it can do the same for services, I (as a consumer) will be very happy.
The type of people that will use this (an electrician as an example) will be like lambs to the slaughter. While many of us know about the mercuriality of places like Amazon and Google (dropping projects and services when they don't pan out or when they get bored) most "normals" are not aware of the dangers of having their eggs in this type of basket. And the risk that is involved.
Buying anything like refrigerators, pianos, dishwashers, or car audio systems involves some (sometimes heavy) amount of pre- and post-delivery service.
Sometimes that friction might prevent the consumer from clicking the "Buy" button, as shopping around, contacting and then scheduling haul-away, delivery or installation jobs is not something people get excited about.
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