Amazon Home Services provides plumbers, painters and goats with a click

Amazon

Devin Coldewey NBC News

3 hours ago

The next time you need a room painted, a leaky sink fixed or a TV mounted, you may be able to just add it to your Amazon shopping cart with a click rather than go through the usual rigmarole. Amazon Home Services is the tech giant's latest offering, letting users across the country line up an electrician or mechanic with a click.

It's an alternative to the traditional means of hiring such pros, but also a shot across the bows of competing sites like Angie's List, which maintains ratings and recommendations for local providers. But unlike Angie's List, there would be no fee to peruse reviews and pricing. And because you pay through Amazon, the billing process is simplified for both consumer and professional.

"What were trying to do for costumers is make it as easy to buy a service as it is to buy a physical product on Amazon today," explained Amazon's Peter Faricy to TODAY.

TODAY

The most popular services, by Amazon's estimate, are what you might expect: painter, handyman, plumber, cleaner, and so on. But there may be less common services available as well got some brush that needs clearing? Hire some goats to chew their way through it. All in all there's a total of 2.4 million service offers across more than 700 categories of professional service types, all of which Amazon claims to have evaluated and hand-picked. (No babysitters yet, unfortunately.)

It's a widespread but still limited roll-out: New York, L.A., San Francisco, and Amazon HQ Seattle are getting the most service coverage, so if you're in Chicago, Miami or a smaller town, don't expect the full rent-a-goat treatment. By the end of the year, however, Faricy hinted, the biggest 30 metro areas in the country should be catching up.

Want to give it a try? Just go to Amazon and look up a service just like you'd look up a book or gadget.

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Amazon Home Services provides plumbers, painters and goats with a click