mail-order company

 mail-order company

Mail-order business: a selling strategy where the customer puts an order by mail after the seller makes an offer via a mass-mailed circular or catalog or via an advertising in a newspaper or magazine. The products may be delivered on a cash-on-delivery basis via freight, express, or parcel post. Although millions of consumers in metropolitan regions today participate in retail mail-order sales, the business was first designed for rural clients.

Although department stores now do a substantial amount of business via their mail-order sections, the majority of mail-order enterprises have been tiny specialist businesses selling through the conventional way. Nonetheless, a small number of companies offering general product lines account for the majority of the mail-order business. At the start of the 20th century, two American corporations, Montgomery Ward & Company and Sears, Roebuck & Company, were the biggest in the world. Many big merchants coupled mail-order circularizing with billing after around 1960, when automated mailing lists and technology were available. Direct mail was a key tool used by book and record clubs to promote books, phonographs, and tape recordings.

Although mail-order businesses had existed in some capacity in the US since the colonial period, they did not become a major force in domestic commerce until the late 19th century. The expansion of general goods mail-order shops was aided by the development of the continental rail network. The growth of the mail was aided by the ability to offer farmers a wide range of commodities at relatively cheap costs, a postal rate structure that promoted the distribution of catalogs and mail-order periodicals, and the creation of the parcel-post system in 1913. - Managing orders.

The European mail-order industry began to take shape in the late 1800s, but the years after 1945 saw its most significant expansion. It was expanding in France and the Netherlands by the middle of the 1970s, but it was strongest in West Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, and Great Britain. There has been a trend in Germany and France to concentrate in niche products like jewelry, cigars, or textiles, while in Great Britain, mail-order firms provide a large selection of consumer durables under well-known brand names. The growing homogeneity of customer preferences has prompted European retailers to go global; Great Universal Stores Ltd., based in Great Britain, has branches in South Africa and Switzerland, for instance.