Quote:
Originally Posted by bnorth
It is expensive but I have used USPS Priority Mail Express International with high end cards to Canada.
Also send cheaper stuff in a PWE to Canadian members without any problems.
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And on the reverse side of this equation, I've used the Canadian version of Priority Mail to ship to the U.S. Just remember that Priority (both the U.S. & Canadian equivalents) have a very low insured value threshold. UPS is also low at $1000, I believe, but Priority Mail is ridiculous. I think it's $100. Priority Mail has actually been the least troublesome of all options for me over the years, followed by UPS. I'm mostly a UPS guy nowadays, as it's easy to get people on the phone in the rare event of an issue. Unfortunately, Registered Mail is no longer an option for sending to/from Canada.
Keep in mind that the declared $ threshold where Canadians have to pay taxes on international purchases is much smaller than yours is in the U.S. It starts at $20. Now, they don't always enforce this for whatever reason. I've had shipments with declared values of over $100 arrive without my having to pay a dime, but conversely have had to pay on $50 declarations. And as someone else mentioned, when using UPS or FedEx, your buyer may incur ridiculous brokerage fees if declared value is over a small amount (I think it's $25 CAD, roughly just under $20 USD). Brokerage fees to not happen when using USPS.
TL; DR for the next two paragraphs. TRY TO AVOID SHIPPING TO CANADA VIA USPS FIRST CLASS WITH TRACKING WHENEVER POSSIBLE.
By and large, using discounted, third party methods for this are even slower than using USPS directly. Either option should be avoided when you can, although sometimes it really is the best choice of a bad lot.
One method I would advise avoiding when sending to Canada is First Class with tracking. The tracking information is only good until the shipment leaves your country, then there is no further available tracking info. I've lost a couple of very expensive shipments this way. They were lost or stolen in the black hole that is the Chicago International Distribution Center. I've also had packages sit in that center for over 100 days before they started moving again. Unfortunately, First Class with tracking is also the most sensible option from a cost perspective for items within a certain dollar amount, say $50-200. I find it best to ALWAYS communicate with the other party all of what I mentioned about the Chicago center and that, while most packages arrive within a couple of weeks, just for them to please have patience regardless. Canadians are far more well-versed on this than Americans, as we buy far more from your country than the other way around. We're just used to all the B.S. with both countries' postal systems.
Every First Class with tracking shipment going to Canada that is east of a certain area (from my experience, east of Colorado) will make its way to that Chicago International Distribution Center. That's an insane amount of the country, and it all goes to one place. Things west of there all seem to head to a similar series of centers in the Los Angeles area. This is a totally separate nightmare. They are much worse than Chicago. Incredibly slow. Tracking constantly shows packages bouncing around from one USPS location to another, and back again, then a package will have no info for a month or more. I find this to happen with more than 80% of shipments from this area, so to my West Coast friends, please take strong note and find other methods.
These are the exceptions rather than the standard, but this stuff happens with enough frequency that you can expect to deal with it on occasion.
There are other methods that get the job done fast and mostly trouble-free, but I won't post them in a public forum!
