There’s a classic irony in digital companies turning to physical environments to drive sales or cut-through. Facebook’s apologies were a boon to newspaper ad departments last year (we suspect full rate card was applied). Meanwhile direct-to-consumer brands are keen to get their products into stores when they reach a certain stage of maturity.

eBay is clearly going for growth in mature segments, cold-mailing households that may or may not want to use its platform as well as existing customers. Its latest data implies that sales in Australia are more prevalent on desktop devices than mobile. For example, a car or truck part is ordered every 4 seconds when desktop and mobile sales are combined, but every 6 seconds via mobile alone. Similarly tool sales are 18 seconds combined and 33 seconds mobile only. That may infer that there is an older demographic at play, though there may be other factors and other product categories where the reverse is true. But targeting a less digitally engaged demographic is potentially a smart move as Google and Facebook gear up to drive more commerce through their platforms, and Amazon continues to threaten. It will be interesting to see whether eBay’s print gamble pays off.