shipping to Canada: Tips
 

I have a card I need to send to Canada. I read a horror story less than a month ago about shipping to Canada. Any tips so the nightmare doesn't happen to me. It's an expensive card.

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Generally speaking, I usually avoid shipping to Canada due to the hassel, expense, and worries of something happening. That said, I made an exception recently. Payment was made using F&F so funds couldn't be pulled back if things went sideways, I shipped using the quickest USPS way possible even though it was more expensive, and packed the card so that it would be safe even if it got run over by a truck. With all that, the number one thing that made me feel OK about the sale was that the buyer has been an active participant on the board for years. A lot can be said for knowing who the other party is and for getting multiple solid references if you don't know them. There's no way I would have done the deal for someone new to the board or had just signed up in the last couple years.

We ship a dozen or so packages to Canada each auction. USPS all the way or your buyer can get hit by mysterious charges by UPS or Fed EX (not customs) and frankly USPS seems quicker. Pack it like it's a Faberge Egg.

have you had any hiccups? are their tiers of shipping?

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I have been seeing posts like this for years. Put the card in an envelope and head to USPS. Get yourself a tracking number and off you go. No problem. It's Canada, not somewhere half way around the world. It may be too expensive but the buyer pays shipping anyway.
I ship dozens of packages a month from Canada to the US and only remember 1 issue in the last decade.
If it's a high value item, FedEx all the way, never use UPS for cross border shipping. Make sure the buyer is aware that customs charges will apply if you're not comfortable sending at a lower value

I had one package that bounced around a bit, but I have had much less difficulty with USPS than I did with UPS.

The story I read the other day involved a seller sending an item bought on Ebay to Canada. He had to send to eBay authentication before it could go to Canada. Authentication sent it to a PO Box in Canada, but somehow it was bounced back to the US as undeliverable, and it did not return to ebay, but rather was labeled as lost. EBay froze the account of the seller, through no fault of his own. After nearly two months, eBay paid back the seller. The card was sold by USPS to a lost merchandise buyer, and the card ended up on eBay again.

I don't believe anything like this will happen to me....I mean, I sent boxes from Thailand by 6-8 weeks boat ride that arrived safely. But I also wasn't sending a valuable card either and didn't care if some necklaces and film got lost.

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On an entirely unrelated note, my wife and brother-in-law lived in South America during the 2000s. They both would adhere pictures of Christ on the package to prevent theft and mischief. I guess it works; bad mojo to mess with jobu's rum. If you need to send items to our southern continent cousin, remember that piece of advice.

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I've read a lot about cross border deliveries. Usually you want to arrive at the border around 2:00-3:00 am to minimize any unwanted attention. Flash your lights twice, and keep the car running. When you see the single flash of lights in return, you know the deal is still on. Ignore the men with guns (they're there for your protection as well as their own), and drop the money in the back of the car that flashed you earlier. They'll load the return wares in your car, at which point you drive like hell to get away from the border.

It helps if your car has a discrete compartment like this.

I sold a card to a Canadian buyer who had a U.S. post office box in Washington state somewhere. He’d drive into the US every few months to collect his mail, so I only had to ship it there.

I stay away its a horror show ,,

this is quite funny. who could predict buying/selling cards would come to this?

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I find this part of the story suspect, as I was under the impression that eBay authentication was only for domestic orders.

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.

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! :)