Ebay sellers not shipping to Canada?

[thetruthisoutthere]

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.

[brandoningram]

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?

[glchen]

Originally Posted by brandoningram

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?

This is still a tough call if you're a Top Rated ebay seller. Top Rated gives you a 20% discount on all of your ebay fees, which can be pretty substantial. However, to get the discount, you basically need to maintain your Detailed Seller Ratings at a very high level, and the two big ones here are Shipping Time and Shipping/Handling Charges. If it takes a month to ship to Canada, you risk a serious ding for Shipping Time. If you send via First Class like in this case, the shipping charge to Canada may be $15+. Then you're risking that the buyer may ding you on Shipping Charges. (And to make this worse, ebay is now including shipping charges as part of the total sale that they charge the fees for.) The cumulative effect is that this is often too much risk for ebay sellers to sell to Canada. On the other hand, if some other alternative to ebay such as grandslambids is able to generate enough of a following, sellers would love to move their wares there. GSB has much lower fees than ebay, so the Top Rated system is irrelevant. Buyers are still protected if they pay via Paypal, and sellers can charge reasonable shipping fees to Canada that would include tracking and not worry about getting their DSR's dinged.

[thecatspajamas]

Originally Posted by glchen

Top Rated gives you a 20% discount on all of your ebay fees, which can be pretty substantial. However, to get the discount, you basically need to maintain your Detailed Seller Ratings at a very high level, and the two big ones here are Shipping Time and Shipping/Handling Charges.

Ebay is now looking at your international DSR scores separately from your domestic ones in figuring your Top Rated Seller status for that reason exactly. It's the one sensible move that they have made in recent memory, and sure enough, if I look at my international vs. domestic low-star scores, I have several in the shipping time category. Not enough to lose my status though. THAT I lost about 3 months ago when a single buyer won 21 items at auction and dinged me on EVERY SINGLE ONE because he thought my combined shipping price was too high (even though it was exactly what it was stated in my listing that it would be, he paid it without question, and never e-mailed me once to see why it was higher than he expected). It has cost me several hundred dollars in fees (due to not getting the 20% discount), so I definitely see where sellers should be concerned, but as long as eBay is considering the two separately, I don't think that shipping to other countries isn't any more risky to your DSR scores than domestic sales.

[buymycards]

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

[Bilko G]

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.