I live in Quebec, Canada and lately have been listing more stuff than usual on ebay, mostly because I have so much stuff, trying to get rid of some. It seems to me that selling on ebay as a canadian is kind of frustrating because of the high shipping prices. Shipping to US is quite expensive, more so it appears than the reverse situation. ( At least for some types of packages ) Do you guys have any tricks to make you life easier as a Canadian based seller? I have one person tell me recently that my shipping rates were too high. ( but they are straight from the calculator ) Of course he was from USA and I wonder if he noticed i was in Canada... Maybe not, seeing as USA is 10 times bigger, I guess some people take domestic USA shipping rates for granted. This make my life harder since the Canadian market is relatively small and I have to accept a substantial loss to be competitive with US sellers. To boot I get double fuck*d by ebay charging me final value on shipping too, ( not cool when shipping is > than item value ) Of course this is not much an issue for High value small items. But lately I am mostly listing various junk like low value electronics and books.
I feel your pain and I'm afraid I don't know a way to get cheaper shipping. Canada is completely fucked up in terms of shipping fees... it's the most dumb-fucked ripoff fee-system in the entire world, and I sent/received stuff from Germany, Spain, France, England, Ireland, Denmark, Sweden, Italy, China, Japan, USA, Brazil, Switzerland, Austria and probably a quadrillion other countries - but Canada is the worst. Slow and expensive, for no reason at all. Dumb fucks, don't get me started on Canadian shipping or I start swearing, oh, never mind, I already got started Anyways, rant over - let's forget about it and carry on. Happy again.
Canada is expensive for most things, eh? I don't understand why there isn't more competition out there to drive prices down.
The private shipping companies pretty much all have the same rates and they are in no rush to try to drive the price down it seems. For large package shipped domestic they are the better option but not so much when its time to cross the border. One thing that can help explain Canada's higher prices are taxes, especially here in quebec. Taxes drive up the prices of many goods and services. Stuff like a bottle of wine can cost over 4 times as much as the same bottle in the USA. Most of it is Tax. Shipping is also directly taxed, 5% to 15% depending on the province ( 15% here in quebec ) but also indirectly taxed because fuel is very heavily taxed so any kind if freight will cost more as a result. The main postal service is nationalized in most countries and some of them ( Like china I am sure ) are subsiding it to promote exports but I have a feeling this is the opposite in Canada, the government uses it as a source of profit.
