Companies that Still Don't Ship to Canada?

mstich asks: "I'm curious as to why some companies make it so difficult to ship to Canada (from the U.S.A.). I'm only about 200km (124mi) from Detroit, so distance surely can't be the problem. Companies like NewEgg state that they won't ship to Canada, even though they will ship to Alaska (albeit, at an inflated cost) and some, like Crucial, do ship to Canada but they won't extend their 'free second day shipping'. Are there really that many underlying costs that show up when crossing the border? Is this just another money grabber? Does NAFTA fit into all of this, somehow?"

Comments

Not NAFTA

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it might in some way, but the big bottleneck is US Customs Service. And Canada's equivalent might be a player in the equation as well.

Customs

[planetmn]

I believe that you still need to fill out customs documents. Call UPS and just ask what paperwork they need to ship to Canada.

Try Local

[Sepper]

If you can't get it shipped, try buying Local! If a company is willing to ship it here (Canada), they probably have a Candian version of the Store.. Like Tigerdirect or Amazon (although Amazon.ca doesn't have much compared to Amazon.com)

Or simply buy at a local store... Like the Vermont public TV said: "A dollar spent in Vermont stays in Vermont"... Apply where you live...

Small market?

[FlyingOrca]

I don't think too many companies operating in the States would voluntarily shut themselves out of TEN PERCENT of the US market; that's about the proportion in additional sales that Canada would represent.

In tech, since Canada is arguably the most wired nation in the world (can't recall where I saw the stats, but I did see them recently), the market gains might be even higher. Think that's insignificant? Walk over to your sales department and ask them if they'd like you to boost sales by ten percent. ;-)

Canadian laws and shipping

[FlyingOrca]

...are far less of an obstacle than they are made out to be. I order from small specialty companies in the USA fairly often. I sometimes have to pay a shipping surcharge, and always specify that I will clear items through customs myself. However, the big courier companies have all managed to ship my purchases quickly and easily.

Now postal service is another issue. USPS shipments to Canada get blackholed so frequently it's just not worth it. But really - why use one country's postal service to ship to another country? Use an international carrier in the first place. (I don't know whether it's the USPS or Canada Post dropping my packets, and I'm not trying to assign blame. I just know stuff doesn't get through and it's kind of daft - for me at least - to keep using them.)

Anyway, Canadian law does restrict entry on certain items (off the top of my head, certain kinds of firearms would be a good example). Other than items that are banned in Canada, I haven't heard of legal issues shipping here from the States. Can you give me an example? I should add that I'm from the USA originally; not only does my family ship a lot of private stuff back and forth, we make a lot of purchases from the US as well.

And shipping via a big courier company from the US to Canada is pretty painless. If your shipping department can't handle it, I think there might be something wrong with your shipping department. ;-)

Now what do you mean about programming for international shipping? Are you saying that if your order system was designed so poorly that it can't handle orders to the USA's biggest trading partner (let alone other international destinations), and can't easily be expanded to handle them, that it's not worth the cost of changing it? Sounds like a specious argument to me, but if you have specifics, I'd love to hear them. Cheers!

Re:Duties & Consumer Laws

[FlyingOrca]

To sell IN CANADA, you have to conform to certain documentation regulations... if you're in Quebec. I don't believe you have to provide documentation or services in French if you're located in Canada but outside Quebec.

To sell goods TO CANADIANS, which is what we're talking about here, you don't have to do any such thing. And as for import duties:

1) anyone who has ordered anything from the States expects to pay GST and import duty on pickup;

2) import duties are not generally outrageous; in my experience they're less than the GST or about the same

Now, brokerage fees can be outrageous (see discussion earlier in this thread), but they are an avoidable scam by the carriers, and have nothing to do with the shipper.

Credit Card Address Verification

[Michael Spencer Jr.]

I work for a major credit card processor. Don't worry, I'm already at the karma cap.

Electronic credit card processing systems have an address verification service available. My company primarily uses Vital Processing Services (vitalps.com) and that system's address verification service supports checking the leading digits of the street address, as well as the billing zip code. It does this by sending an address-verification query to systems owned by whatever bank owns that card. That bank checks that query against their billing information for that customer, and reports back if some or all of the address information matches ("ZIP MATCH", "EXACT MATCH", "NO MATCH", etc.)

This address verification service only supports numeric zip codes and street addresses. If address verification is attempted against a Canadian address, the address verification system returns SYSTEM NOT AVAILABLE. (It's not available because the bank that issues that card is in a foreign country, even if someone types in a 5-digit zip code when doing the transaction.)

It's impossible for an Internet merchant to get perfect protection against fraud while accepting payment from Visa or Mastercard, but they can eliminate many of the common sources of fraud by always using a tracking shipping carrier (and getting a signature proof of delivery every time), and only shipping to an address that the address verification system indicates a match with. (If the customer is ordering an item as a gift, sending it to a different address than they receive their credit card billing statements at, best practices state the merchant should ask the customer to call their bank and "whitelist" that shipping address.)

Since many (most?) processing systems' address verification services don't support international address verification, most merchants must choose to either ship merchandise internationally without getting an address match, or to manually find the phone number for the bank that issued the card and *call them*. (Merchants who accept credit cards are given access to a system that lets them look up the first 6 digits of a Visa card or the first 11 digits of a Mastercard and find the bank that issued that card.) For small merchants, or merchants with occasional big-ticket purchases, they can take the time to personally attend to those transactions and make phone calls. For a large discount Internet superstore of some kind, though, they just don't have time to personally handle every address-mismatch.

So for convenience, they just refuse to accept cards that return a SYSTEM NOT AVAILABLE address-verification match.

--Michael Spencer