The Collaborative International Dictionary
mail-order buying \mail-order buying\, mail-order \mail-order\n. The buying and selling of goods to be shipped from the vendor through the mail to the purchaser. Information about to be purchased may be found in catalogs, advertisements, on the web, etc., and purchase orders transmitted to the vendor by mail, telephone, or internet connection.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1875, from mail (n.1) + order. Before television and the Internet, the bane of retailers and shop-owners.\n\nThe origin, foundation and principle of mail order trading is universally recognized as wrong. It was conceived in iniquity and brought forth in despair as the world's greatest destructive medium. Mail Order Trading was born in the brain of knaves and thieves who fired their building for insurance profits, then sold the salvaged and damaged stock to the unsuspecting sons of man in distant territory.
[Thomas J. Sullivan, "Merchants and Manufacturers on Trial," Chicago, 1914]
Wiktionary
vb. To buy or sell goods to be delivered by mail
Usage examples of "mail-order".
She came out here answerin' an ad for a mail-order bride, but the fella was gone.
The alla catalog combines all the existing human mail-order catalogs into one.
Over dinner Fielding explained to me about the lucrative contingencies of pornography, the pandemonium of Forty-Second Street, the Boylesk dealerships on Seventh Avenue with their prodigies of chickens and chains, the Malibu circuit with the crews splashing through the set at dusk for the last degrees of heft and twang and purchase from the beached male lead on the motel floor, the soft proliferations of soft core in worldwide cable and network and its careful codes of airbrush and dick-wipe, the stupendous aberrations of Germany and Japan, the perversion-targeting in video mail-order, the mob snuff-movie operation conceived in Mexico City and dying in the Five Boroughs.
Everybody, but everybody Comes In dead-eyed and puke-white and with their face hanging down around their knees and with a well-thumbed firearm-and-ordnance mail-order catalogue kept safe and available at home, map-wise, for when this last desperate resort of hugs and cliches turns out to be just happy horseshit, for you.
A really loving wife might work for ten or twelve years to create a tapestry showing how her husband had worked up from the lowly post of office boy to be vice-president in charge of the mail-order department, along the lines of the Bayeux Tapestry.
It is not known whether he met her through the same mail-order bride service as Nichols.
Here he was, the most respected car dealer in the county (Ho, Ho, Ho Middleton for a crackerjack deal on new or used), hot on the trail of an escaped convict, two old ladies, and a cop with a mail-order badge.
It wasn't illegal, but Chinese White was much purer and stronger than the stuff doled out by pharmacists and mail-order houses.
He sat in the shade of an elm that was in the last stages of rampant Dutch elm disease, his bottom resting against the frayed straps of a Sears, Roebuck mail-order lawn chair that was in the last stages of useful service.
He opened the mailbox and extracted a thick sheaf of mail, mostly third-class junk, which reminded him that he lived in a prestigious zip code and was on every mail-order hit list in the nation.
She and her partner, Rich Cooper, had built Serenissima up from a small two-person mail-order business to the burgeoning international organization it was today.
Blonde, thin and fragile, the woman had a plain face and good figure though on the rare occasions when she and girlfriends went to the rocky beach at Indian Leap riverside at Klamath Falls, she would wear a highnecked swimsuit that she'd bought mail-order so she wouldn't have to try it on in a store.
Most of the rest were spamads for weight loss programs, hair transplant treatments, laser eye surgery, special offers for Viagra, Russian mail-order brides.
Alphonse was the Governor of Quelimane's eldest surviving son, fullblooded Portuguese by the lawfully wedded bride who had come out forty years previously from Lisbon, a pale sickly mail-order bride, who had borne three sons in swift succession, the first two of which had succumbed to malaria and infantile dysentery even before the appearance of the little wizened yellowed mite whom they had named Alphonse Jose Vila y Pereira, and expected to bury with his brothers before the end of the rains.
SHIEL received an Oriental mail-order bride for his future-war novel The Seven-Hundred-Dollar Hammer (1898).