Parcel Post - USA to Canada

Factual Questions
1

I must be missing something simple here, so maybe a few Dopers can enlighten me on easy and reasonably cheap mailing of small packages to Canada.

I occasionally need to mail a small box of parts to someone in Canada. I don’t use UPS because it has always been at least twice as expensive as parcel post.

I am outside of town, so I try to handle everything I can online. However, you cannot do First Class Mail to Canada online - only Priority or Express Mail. The small boxes I usually ship are the Small Flat Rate Priority Mail box, which costs $5.15 to anywhere in the USA, but is supposed to cost $12.95 to Canada, which is reasonable.

However, to send something out of the USA, you have to fill out information and print out customs paperwork, and these papers must go in a specific USPS clear sleeve so that the address can be read and the paperwork is easily removed and replaced.

Unfortunately, this special sleeve is larger than the smaller Priority Mail boxes, so it would have to be folded over edges and corners to go on the box. This, of course, is more likely to tear the sleeve off or jam in a machine, and it would make it very difficult to remove and replace the paperwork in them with the sleeve so distorted.
The smallest Priority Mail box that can be used to Canada, and is large enough for the sleeve, cost $32.95, which is too much to spend.

I used to just go to the nearby UPS Store and process Canada orders there, but they have today informed me that they can no longer do parcels to Canada. Something about the small postcard form I used to fill out has to be typed now, and even though they had been typing them, they can no longer PP to Canada.

So, if I have a small box to send to Canada, and I don’t want to go into town to the post office to send it, and I prefer to handle it online, how do I do this for a reasonable price?

P.S. I just talked to one of my Canadian customers and they informed me that the price you see on the USPS webpage to send a package to Canada does not cover door-to-door. It only covers USA to the border. When the package is delivered to his house, they demand more money for the Canadian Post for their delivery part.

2

Your Canadian customer is only speaking for a specific situation - I’ve bought many things from the US for $10-$20 shipping, and the parcels have all been delivered directly to my house with no extra charges involved. My preferred shipping from the US is USPS - if the company uses anything else, the shipping is likely to be so expensive that I simply won’t buy from them ($60 shipping on a $25 item? Not gonna happen.)

3

What Canada Post is charging him for is a brokerage fee as well as GST (Goods and Services Tax) and maybe PST (Provincial Sales Tax); Canada Post acts as a customs broker under those circumstances. UPS does the same, except they charge **A LOT **more for brokerage fees (unless things have changed in the past few years, and I don’t think they have) than Canada Post. Not sure how it works for companies to avoid those fees when they ship stuff to you; I think there are ways for companies to pre-pay those.

4

I routinely ship an odd-sized box (3 feet long, 2"x2") to international destinations via USPS. I use Priority Air Mail, but the situation is the same for you and me: I do the customs/shipping info online, and then print out a stack of paperwork that ends up getting stuffed into the plastic pouch. The pouch gets wrapped around the box; I imagine it makes it a bit more tedious for the various postal employees along the way to access this paperwork, but I have shipped several dozen packages like this, and they’ve all reached their destination without incident.

With the customs form preprinted, and the postage prepaid, the wait at the post office is short: I hand off my package and my forms, they clerk scans the form and hands me a receipt, and he takes care of the rest (stuffing the pouch, securing it to the package, etc.).
FWIW, I’ve never had a customer from Canada or anywhere else tell me that they were charged postage due when the package arrived at their house.

5

FWIW, I use endicia.com and with them you can print first class international postage, and rather than the multipage customs form needed for priority, first class prints a single sheet label about 4" x 6" that you can print on label paper or use regular paper and just tape on the box (I don’t tape over the bar codes as I’ve heard it makes them hard to scan).

I assume stamps.com works the same.

6

Use usps.com to fill out the forms for small flat rate boxes. It prints the customs form for you as part of the shipping label. I use it frequently, two or three times a week, and I have never had a problem.

8

You have no problem that the custom forms and envelope are bigger than the box itself and have to be wrapped around the package?

I would think that they might occasionally get torn off in process, or the paperwork damaged and rejected.