by Pamela N. Danziger , -- Forbes -- I discovered you could buy homes on Amazon by accident one day while shopping. After I stopped laughing – “Who puts a $46,900 charge on their American Express there?” – I had to do more research. I discovered plenty of people are not afraid to buy a house on Amazon. Two companies that have built a home business on Amazon are Allwood Industrials selling cabin kits and MODS International offering container homes . Both companies have found a market there. Allwood cabin kits for the do-it-yourselfer With his roots in Scandinavia, Tapani Pekkala, who hails from Finland, offers an IKEA-inspired approach to home construction. The kit cabin market in Europe is well developed, he told me, where over 120,000 kits are sold each year. With limited space to build, Europeans who long for a Scandinavian-style lake house, erect kit cabins in their backyard to create a personal getaway. The trend is now moving state side. “Kit cabins are finally becoming popular here and they are playing a role in the tiny house movement, which happened to coincide with Allwood’s expansion into this category,” Pekkala says. After founding Allwood Industrials in 2000 selling imported wood products, Pekkala saw the opportunity to market cabin kits back in 2012. A friend from Finland who worked as head of sales for one of the largest cabin manufacturers there tested the product here. When that initial trial with the first US distributor did not work out, Allwood stepped in to secure its first major cabin kit supplier.

The company launched first on its own online website. Having been an established vendor with Home Depot and Lowes, Allwood approached these big-box home building retailers about selling kits, but they were originally lukewarm. Then after Allwood launched on Amazon in 2013, the big-boxes saw the light. “Back when we started working with Home Depot and Lowes, they were each others’ worse competitor. Now it’s becoming Amazon,” Pekkala shares. Today Allwood cabin kits are available on Houzz, eBay, Outlook.com and will shortly be added to HomeDepot.com and Wayfair. But Amazon will continue as a powerful third-party internet partner with great resources that they know how to use to the max. “Amazon is very thorough, so it is no surprise they are so successful,” Pekkala states. “Their seller support is great. They have been enthusiastic and supportive all the way even though we are a small company and sell a very unique product.” Allwood’s uniqueness has been a key advantage of listing its cabin kits on Amazon. When people come there searching for house or home, Allwood’s cabins end up in the Amazon Buy Box, the gold standard for a listing on Amazon, which is how I first came upon them. “Unlike in other product segments where different vendors have to fight to get a preferred listing in the Buy Box, we get there over 90% of the time. That is a huge driver of business and inquiries to us.”

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