Amazon recently announced the launch of Amazon Home Services, in which it handpicks local service businesses to include in a marketplace on Amazon.com, enabling customers to purchase services from those in the home improvement, computer & electronics, lawn & garden, automotive, and other categories.
We first learned about the service last summer, but now it’s been launched, albeit, in a limited capacity. For now, it’s only available in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle, but it will expand in time.
If new data from Walker Sands is any indication, the offering could be a big success for Amazon. It finds that 27% of consumers report already buying tools or home improvement products via Amazon. It also finds that consumers are making web purchases more frequently, and are spending more in a broader range of product categories.
Things are looking pretty good for Amazon’s endeavor when you consider that it found that while four out of ten consumers are open to purchasing any type of product online from either retailers or third-party sites like Amazon, they trust Amazon more than other retailers in ten out of eleven product categories.
A few more interesting findings from the study:
– 68 percent of U.S. consumers shop online at least once per month, up from 62 percent a year ago, and 28 percent make web purchases at least once a week.
– Consumers are buying more expensive items online, with 76 percent saying they would spend more than $100 on a product without seeing it first, up from 70 percent a year ago.
– While free shipping continues to be the top reason consumers say they would shop online more (83 percent), free returns (65 percent) have surpassed one-day shipping (62 percent) for the No.2 spot.
In fact, free shipping, or lack thereof, is one of the leading causes of shopping cart abandonment for ecommerce sites, so it’s no surprise to see it remain such a priority.
“Online shopping has become so commonplace that retailers have to make the experience as easy and convenient as possible if they want to continue growing their e-commerce revenue,” the report says. “With consumers shopping online more frequently and spending more across an increasing number of product categories, retailers that remove as much friction from the online shopping experience as possible will capture the most additional sales.”
Either way, it’s going to remain hard to compete with Amazon with everyone trusts them more than every other site.
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