If I could have one fuckin Ebay auction where I ship to Canada and it turns out all right, I think I’d lose my fuckin mind.
Auction #1: Hey, I won your bid of ten serial killer documenteries on VHS. What’s that gonna cost to ship here? Hmm, well using the slowest rate, it would cost about five bucks to ship in the States, so that should be fine. Slowest Canadian price: 16 bucks. Ok, that one was my fault for being a dipshit. I ate the cost.
Auctions #3-5: Didn’t pay.
Auction #6: Talked for a time with a nice Canadian man who wanted to buy an uber-rare movie on VHS. He paid 60 bucks for the thing. I told him that it went out the day after he bought it. That was June 19th. Today, I get it returned from the mail with a sticker from the Canadian Postal Service saying that a) Canada had refused this mail and b) “No sender name in Arabic Numerals and/or Roman Letters.” Took me a few hours to figure out what that meant. Apparently, I only put an address down in the From section of the envelope. They require a name. Did you know this? I didn’t know this. So now this poor man is probably trying to ban my PayPal account for fraud as we speak. I guess it didn’t matter that my fuckin claims form WHICH HAD MY SIGNATURE ON IT was attached to the very same envelope.
PURE. FUCKIN. BULLSHIT.
I guess I should expect this kind of tawdry nonsense from a country so devoid of interesting history that they must adorn their currency with beavers.
Your OP is confusing because you keep switching voices. In one sentence, you’re a Doper addressing his audience. In the next you’re an e-bay buyer addressing you, the e-bay seller. In the next, you’re you, the e-bay seller, addressing his seller. Then you revert back to being the Doper addressing his audience. It makes you appear to be schizophrenic. Stop it.
As to your OP: even though Canada and Mexico are in North America, they are still foreign countries. If you choose to conduct business in those countries, educate yourself about their import/export rules and shipping rates.
Speaking as a sometime eBay-er who’s shipped several packages to Canada - my experience was always that they were slower than the USPS, but beyond that, there was no problem.
But the customs forms are a pain the arse, I agree.
One question, though - if you’re already using PayPal to recieve your payments, why don’t you pay your postage and print your address forms that way? Among other things the forms you fill out will automatically make sure your printed postage has all the required fields filled in.
I’m living in Canada now and most of my family is still in the U.S.
Canada Post sucks and is unpredictable. A letter sent from Spain, according to the postmarks, took two days to get to Toronto, then over a week to get from Toronto to London, Ontario (a city about a two our drive from TO.) Then the next letter you send from Toronto to London might get there practially the same day.
I find it’s not so bad sending packages OUT of Canada, but it can be unpredictable when packages are coming IN to Canada. However, when I buy stuff online, I usually get the package within 10 business days. You just have to be sure to cross your Ts and dot your Is. They are getting more and more stringent about stadardization and making sure everything is more easily machine readable for sorting.
Blaming an entire country and its people because they suffer under a less then stellar postal system…?
If George Inness painted with a brush that wide, he’d have painted barns*; probably 3 a day.
*Real ones, not just canvas landscapes containing them in the subject matter.
Fwiw, you all started that ‘you must have a specific, named addressee for packages crossing the border’ shit after 9/11 and the anthrax scares (which is bonus stupid because the rule, as far as I know, applies to packages and not envelopes, or at least, isn’t enforced on envelopes). If we reciprocated on your policy, that ain’t our fault.
Exactly. And the ripoff shipping costs work both ways. Once, when ordering some rare books from an American company, I was surprised to find that while the shipper would gladly send the books via USPS ground to an American address, it would only send them to Canada via overnight air courier–at a cost of US$45! Why, I don’t know, except possibly the American shipper’s knowledge of geography was so poor that it didn’t realize that Canada and the US share a land border over which a bazillion trucks carrying all kinds of goods and mail roll every day. :rolleyes: I needed the books, so I paid it (and the #@$% customs brokerage fee too), but really, why would the shipper refuse to send them cheaply via mail? I guess I should expect this kind of tawdry nonsense from a country so greedy that it must adorn its currency with pictures of its Treasury Building.
No sympathy here on shipping costs between the US and Canada, Johnny. Deal with it; when we order things from the US, we sure as hell have to.
Can I blame the whole country for sending their stupid cold fronts to NY all winter long? It would be a managable 33 degrees here and then Canda blows it’s mighty wind in our direction and then-- bam!-- 13 with winds gusting up to 20.*
*That’s degrees and miles per hour. And no, I cannot translate it into Canadianese. I’m American, dammit! I do what I want! And don’t you dare go calling yourself American either, you Canadianese imposters.
Shame on Canda for following the US in requiring that foreign shipments list an addressee!
And while we are at it, shame on Canada for the time an American customs broker charged over three-hundred dollars to clear through US customs a pair of borrowed skis that I was returning to the manufacturer in the USA.
I’ve been on eBay for several years. Got thousands of transactions under my belt, incoming and outgoing. My only problems/complaints?
Canada Post is expensive. Much more so than USPS.
Canada Post has much more stringent “small parcel” and “letter post” restrictions than the USPS.
They are about as good at handling packages labeled “fragile” as they are with packages labeled “I LIKE IT WHEN YOU STOMP ON MY HEAD.” Which is about on par with UPS (Oops) and Puro (Puree) anyway.
They’ve lost a few parcels. Three or four in about as many years, which I suppose isn’t a terrible track record, but it still sucks.
Yeah, customs forms suck and our rules are a bit more strict than others I guess – block letters required, all relevant information (yes, including name – why wouldn’t a name be required?) and suchlike. But that’s the price of dealing internationally – which is anywhere outside the US, not just Canada, and the issues are very similar anyway no matter where you ship.
When I ship, whenever possible I do it through PayPal. It’s quick and painless and once the label is printed all I have to do is take it to the post office and drop it off. I don’t even have to wait in line, and the customs portion is as simple as filling out what it is, what type of shipment it is (gift, sample, etc.) how much it weighs, and what its value is. Easy.
If you’re going to ship internationally, learn the rules and procedures of doing so like everyone else. Plain and simple. Your ignorance is not our fault.
Because postal rates to Canada, even using Ground to go along that lovely land border, are outrageously overpriced. Most likely, your seller’s options were “Air to Canada (delivery in 5-7 days) - $45” or “Ground to Canada (delivery in 14-21 days) - $35.”
I understand Canada is a separate country, but it should not cost these ridiculous sums of money just to ship small packages over a land border with a neighboring (friendly) country like that.
EDIT: Oh, just remembered! There’s also the lovely “International Rates” form on usps.com that attempts to show what one would expect to pay on shipping to Canada. It is almost always on the low end and I usually end up paying more than I bargained for (after the seller and I agreed on the price I thought it would be).
Just a wild ass guess, but perhaps they handle their own customs brokerage for air shipments. That would probably save you time and money, as opposed to a regular independant customs broker handling the clearance.
From what I have come across, the independent brokers tend to be slow and expensive (although I take my hat off to the dude who makes the run from Ryden’s Store up to TBay – door to door with only a short stop at the border to clear customs, and less expensive than the gas it would take to do it myself).
No, I should be kinder. You’re trying to explain and be helpful, Justin, so I shoudn’t snipe at you. Just another example of that famous Canadian niceness.
But my wife, who is originally from the US, is always sending packages, many of which are heavier than my books, back and forth to family members and friends in the US. She tends to ship via ground mail. It’s rare for her to have to spend more than CA$20 to do so; to the best of my knowledge, it has never cost more than CA$30. Delivery in less than two weeks, both ways. I agree that it’s overpriced, but still–it’s a damn sight less expensive than US$45 (which at the time, was about CA$65, to which was added the customs brokerage fee of, IIRC, CA$30), and I’d ordered with enough time that I could have waited a week or two for the books. Maybe what we should have done in retrospect was have the company ship the books via USPS ground to my sister-in-law, who was then living in Seattle; and my SIL could have forwarded them on to me; again, via USPS/Canada Post ground. Would have undoubtedly been cheaper.
On preview: Muffin, the customs brokerage was an independent, based out of Pearson Airport in Toronto. I cannot remember who the courier was–maybe DHL?–but a week or two after my books arrived, a bill from the customs broker was in my mailbox.
