Ebay sellers not shipping to Canada?
Wow...20 seconds left in an auction for a Ban Johnson baseball...I try to throw a $850 ceiling bid on it ( a nice ball for my collection ) and it states that the seller doesnt ship to my region ? F%&% ! I understand that Canada is a completely different country than the U.S., and I understand that I usually have to pay extra in shipping/border costs, but come on people. Its no different than shipping something within the U.S. Im sick to death of sellers not shipping to Canada. Happens to me once or twice a week. The seller misses out on more cash, but mre importantly to me...I miss out on a piece for my collection !
Now thats my perspective...are there any Americans on here that can give me a viable reason for my rant? |
I have always wondered if bay's practice violates NAFTA but will leave that to trade lawyers
The easiest way for you to deal with it is to get a friend in the US or a US shipping address at a PO just across the border. Register on eBay.com with a new user name with this US address. It sucks as you now start out again with zero feedback Max (formerly 5000 positives with old user name, now with386) |
O' Canada
Sorry for your frustration. I understand where you are coming from. I sell on ebay and ship all over the world. The issue as a seller shipping to Canada is tracking. eBay will back you as a seller if for shipments in the US you have tracking info. That way a buyer can't just take the item and then say they did not get it and demand a refund and possibly leave negative feedback. That would be my only reason not to but I choose to ship there anyway as the transactions are always smooth and I rarely have someone claiming they don't receive there items.
I personally don't like buying from Canada (cards) as most Canadian shippers don't fill out a customs form and it takes 3-4 weeks to get my item. I could do the same but want the customers happy. That's all I can come up with ! |
That ain't just right! I have shipped to Canada several times and never an issue once! Sellers need to get with it!!!
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eBay seller protection is completely void unless there is a trackable form of delivery. If I am not mistaken, this means FedEx for outside the US and then costs shoot through the roof. For an pricey items, FedEx may be an option, but for less expensive items it's just not worth the hassle. The seller is left in the position of rolling the dice with a non-trackable form of shipping. All it takes is for one buyer to claim "I didn't get it" and the seller gets hit with a chargeback and has no recourse. I really miss the days of personal checks and postal money orders sometimes. Never once had an issue with those ;) |
I completely see where you guys are coming from. Understandable...but for something like a baseball that is completely ship/cost concious and trackable, there shouldnt be an issue...as long as I ( buyer ) flip the complete shipping costs right?
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Thats correct. Paypal will only back you if you have tracking. I actually thought that having insurance was good enough because the tag had trackable numbers on it. Then I had a customer claim he didn't get the item. I called up USPS and they showed it as delivered. When I gave the numbers to Paypal they told me I had to have confirmation. I told them all they had to do was call USPS and give them the numbers from the insurance slip and they would confirm it was delivered. They would not lift a finger. They will only accept confirmation numbers. So I lost that one. My last experience to Canada was an item that sold for $60. I took a shot at just sending it rather than charge the seller a bunch of money to track it some how (I'm still not sure how). The seller claimed they never got it, so I decided its not worth it anymore.
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I would really hope its not dishonest Canadians that are doing all of these bad dealings to you guys. But by the sounds of it...it is. I also now believe that shipping FedEx, UPS, Purolator is likely the only true way to be sure to get your purchased item ( buyers standpoint ).
I feel bad for you guys who have been screwed around and understand why you guys and others no longer send up here. It sucks for honest guys like me that have a hard time getting things shipped to them... |
I used to not sell to Canada,because when you look up the rates on ebay they always say$10.00 would be the cheapest cost to send a card!then i went to the post office and found that the price is no differerent than sending across country.They just don't list that option on ebay rates. Lou
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Its not the shipping rate, its the confirmation. You can't get it to Canada. If the buyer says he didn't get it, you have no proof and he gets his money back and you get squat.
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Ditto what everyone here is saying. I do ship to Canada (and the UK, Australia, etc.) but I usually make the buyer contact me first and give them the option of USPS Global Priority (usually $12-15 or so) or my reg shipping fee w/o tracking (& let them know I'm not responsible for any item not getting there). I have only ever had one person opt for the priority and that was before X-mas and they wanted it faster for a gift. I also understand that even though we had the conversation should we ever go to ebay "court" I'd still probably lose, I will usually do it anyways. Anybody I know personally from Canada has carte blanche to purchase my items from ebay with no questions asked (as I trust them).
Once ebay prevented sellers from leaving negative feedbacks it became a pretty common Canadian scam to just get free crap from people by doing what others have described above, I was the victim of this once or twice but both items were fairly small and it was basically "the cost of doing business" up north. However, I have been very hesitant to started selling much of my vintage Hockey b/c I know half the buyers will be Canadian and someone will probably try something, but I may bite the bullet at some point. -Rhett |
I sell to Canada, but I always cross my fingers if it goes First Class shipping. I think Canada has the slowest postal system on Earth...almost every time I ship something to Canada a week later I get that same annoying ebay email asking "Where's my item?" You'd think that Canadian buyers would understand that shipping is slow if it's coming from the US. The only thing more annoying than that email is when they ask me to lie on the customs form. With all that said it's still worth it to me to deal with Canadians.
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In the early days of the unholy ebay/Paypal alliance, I lost an $1,100 item in "eBay court" because someone claimed "they didn't get it." While I had tracking information that showed delivery, I didn't know I needed a signature as well. (The buyer asked me to send without signature because he was not home during the day and couldn't make it to the PO on weekends. In retrospect, that was part of the set-up for the scam.) |
Yea, adding another US ebay seller who doesn't ship to Canada because of the tracking issue. And the slow as heck time it takes for an item to get to Canada (~a month). If you're a Top Rated Ebay seller, there's simply too much risk that you will get scammed, get negged, or get a low DSR due to slow shipping.
On the flip side, I actually buy from Canadian sellers all of the time. It takes forever and a day for my cards to arrive, but if you're looking for rare Canadian issued cards or hockey cards, this is what you gotta do. |
I had a Canadian buyer pull the old "I didn't get it" scam. Ever since then, I have to use some type of tracking, and for international shipments, tracking is quite expensive!! Most Canadian bidders don't wish to pay $20+ shipping for a slabbed card.
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I sent a couple postcards up to Canada recently that were both valued over $100 each...I sent them first class, but both buyers had been on ebay for 10 years and had perfect feedback. I crossed my fingers they wouldn't get lost, but I felt assured that these buyers weren't scammers.
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As a relatively new low-end seller on eBay, I do NOT ship to Canada. As a matter of fact, I select all of the safe selling features of eBay (only sell to verified addresses, only positive feedback, etc,...). As a novice learning to sell very low value cards on eBay, the last thing I want are problems mentioned in this thread.
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Me too. Heard one too many horror stories about being conned by Canadian buyers who exploit the holes in the Paypal system.
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It's disappointing as a Canadian that so many U.S. sellers will not ship to Canada.
I understand the frustration of dealing with Paypal policies. I buy and sell, and deal with these regularly. But cutting off all 35 million Canadians because of a few bad deals is unfortunate. As long as U.S. sellers ship with signature confirmation, all they need to do is notify potential customers of associated costs in their sale listing. That way, there are no surprises at check-out time. The U.S. seller is then covered for potential charge-backs. It works both ways, as Canadian sellers face the same issues. And I don't know of one Canadian seller that will not ship to the U.S. |
before getting back into sportscards, I collected/dealt with Action Figures, GI Joe's and such. I dreaded Canadian buyers. I dreaded shipping to Canada. I don't blame the Canadian citizen, I place full blame on Paypal and Ebay. Like others have said, that delivery confirmation is the key. I had an instance last spring in a which a Canadian buyer, from Edmonton, filed an Ebay dispute with me within something like 10 days. I live in South Carolina. I ended up losing(of course), so I was out $50 and my merchandise. Even with that particular buyer being WAY too impatient, I still blame Paypal and Ebay. Neither entity has a clue when it comes to customer service, and seeing things objectively. On the other side, i've sold some hockey cards to Canadians that have taken 3-4 weeks to arrive(and have bought a couple of cards from across the border that took roughly the same amount of time) and never had an issue. Problem for me is, one idiot impatient buyer, and two dishonest entities in Paypal and Ebay(or maybe one, under the same umbrella, which seems like a conflict of interest), ruined a lot of the Ebay experience for me.
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I just moved to Canada. A lot of American sellers won't ship here. Canada Customs dings me 12% HST (Harmonized Sales Tax whatever the heck that is) over items of a certain value. The Royal Mail is slower than the Second Coming. It is going to suck being a baseball card collector in Canada. That is all.
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just let them know first class registered shipping is $15 to canada...if they're willing to pay then you can ship by that method. no need to cut our neighbors from the north out.
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I do but...
I ship to Canada but I don't like it. NO tracking and it takes forever and a day. If I want tracking then it's some outrageous shipping fee. I usually just pray when I ship there :).
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I ship to Canada (and other countries) on a regular basis, but I have to admit, it's a bit of a crapshoot. I have gotten so many e-mails starting with "Where is my item?" that I have worked up a standardized response. The reality is that when you ship outside the country, you're working without a net. You can ship only Fed-Ex or UPS, or you can refuse to ship internationally. The result will be the same: no international business.
There are NO trackable USPS shipping options for international shipments. Reason being that obviously other countries have separate postal systems, so there's no way for them to scan the package at delivery. Fed-Ex and UPS work because they're still the same company in Canada and everywhere else, all connected to the same tracking system. The one USPS option that might work is Registered Mail with Return Confirmation (in which they have to sign a card which is then mailed back to you as proof of delivery) which usually costs way more than the regular shipping itself. The one time I've used it, it still took about a month to get there (to the Philippines, and it was at the buyer's request due to a large number of stolen packages in his location, yikes!), and it was about 3 weeks from the time he told me the package arrived to when the return card made it back to me. Had he been bent on fraud, the whole case could have been wrapped up by then, and I'm not sure if Paypal would accept the signed card as proof anyway. But I still do ship internationally for the simple reason that there are no more fraudsters outside our borders than there are here in the good ol' USA. I've been taken advantage of more stateside than otherwise, but I still sell in the U.S.A. Whatever fraud protections eBay or Paypal puts in place, there will always be ways for people to get around them. I had a verrrry long conversation with an eBay rep one time about how I could, as a seller, protect myself 100% from someone falsely claiming that they did not receive the package. Was delivery confirmation enough? No, because that just shows the package was delivered, not whether it was delivered to the right address or not. Was signature confirmation 100% foolproof? No, because I have no proof that the person who signed for the package was actually the buyer (have you ever been asked for photo ID when signing for a package? Me either). The end of the conversation was when I bluntly asked the eBay rep if there was any way that I, as a seller, could protect myself 100% from a buyer who was determined to defraud me, and the answer was "no." If a buyer is determined enough to defraud you and lie throughout the Paypal/eBay claims process, there is no guarantee you will come out on top, even with delivery confirmation. In some cases eBay/Paypal may choose to back you under their "Seller Protection" policies, but if it's a high-dollar transaction or if there is any deviation from their very narrow set of qualifiers for the transaction, they'll just refund the buyer's money. (Incidentally, that's exactly what had happened in this case. DC showed the package was delivered, but the buyer said they didn't get it. Paypal removed the funds from my account and refunded them to the buyer. No recourse for me other than the long conversation and suggestion that I submit an official complaint about the policy, which as we all know goes nowhere). But, all that said, I still continue to sell on eBay. Dealing with fraud-minded customers is a part of any sales business (which is another fun quote from that conversation. Thanks eBay rep). Thankfully, there are still far and away more honest buyers out there than dishonest, even north of the border :) So I say that the sellers should do what they have to in order to feel comfortable, but if you want to sell outside the country, you just have to suck it up and do it. It's really not that much of a stretch over selling to US buyers. It just takes longer. |
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Accepting risk, in various forms, is part of being a business owner. I think Cat is correct is that it must be factored in when calculating the "cost of doing business." The problem lies in the part-time seller. If you're someone who does it to raise money to continue collecting or similar, there may be very little profit built in, so one loss could make a huge difference to them. As was stated above, you either use UPS/Fedex, which cost a lot, or USPS and have no protection. Most small sellers can't afford the loss. |
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Ironically, I bought two nice cards from a very nice Japanese seller and received the cards (I only paid $3.50 for shipping) in eight days. Go figure.
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Now what about if the Canadian...myself for instance...was willing to pay the extra for first class priority mail with a sig required...no problem right?
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Canada
GXG from the Postal Service works well for high dollar items. It is trackable and from my Post Office in Wisconsin we can guarantee next day delivery to most places in Canada. It is expensive, but our local auctions houses send dozens of items to Canada with no problem. We can look it up and track it all the way.
Most of the smaller Post Offices don't offer this option, but the medium and large cities do. (Global Express Guaranteed) As far as low dollar items, I have sent many to Canada and never had a problem. Sometimes they get held up in Canadian customs but they always get delivered. Rick |
Thank you to all the sellers that ship to Canada. We love our Baseball cards, Hockey cards and Sports collectibles just as much as you Americans;)
Id also like to mention in the close to 10 years of dealings on the internet, I've completed about 3000 transactions between Canada and the USA (buying/selling/trading) and have ever only once had a package go missing and that was a $40 card several years ago. That's a pretty great track record i have had, id say. |
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