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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?"
you canadians are all the same with your beady little eyes and your flapping heads
Ask a lawyer. Maybe the legal departments of large companies won't allow them to do business in Canada because they don't want to incur the expense of complying with Canadian law.
Just a guess.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
I believe that you still need to fill out customs documents. Call UPS and just ask what paperwork they need to ship to Canada.
/., where "Apple and Google provide Iran with nukes" will be refuted with "But Microsoft is a convicted monopolist"
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
There are a couple of problems, one small, and one not so small.
1. Extra forms to fill out. The company either doesn't want to take the time to fill out the single (small) form, or thinks that the forms will take a long time. Understandable, but frustrating to the paying customer.
2. Irate phone calls from customers who were levied heavy brokerage fees. I was one of these customers a few weeks back, when I got nailed TWICE with brokerage fees (to the US, and back into Canada) for a piece of hardware I sent back for free repair. I bitched so hard at UPS that they dropped the brokerage fees. However, even after that, the cost of the free, under-warranty repair was still $100 US.
Brokerage fees drive me nuts, since most of the time they appear after the fact, and are not consistently applied. This is very frustrating, not to mention expensive.
Also, bear in mind that while a distributor might have the rights for a product in the States, there is no guarantee that they have the rights to distribute that same product in Canada.
Issues like support come into effect; normally, if you buy a product in the States, service for that item are doine through the US based manufacturer, not the manufacturer's Canadian arm.
Some manufacturer's actaully sell different "model" numbers in the two countries with slightly different feature sets. for instance documentation in English & French; not just English..
Have you tried asking any of the companies in question? Believe it or not, they may be staffed by humans who can answer your questions.
Crap, I sound like a troll.
I worked for an online car parts store, and we refused to ship to Canada. Why? Because when the online store first opened we did ship to Canada, but the package would get held up in customs. On top of that there are additional charges (on top of UPS/FedEX rates) to get it OUT of customs. It became this awful nightmare, getting phone calls from irate Canadians who blamed us when shipping a part from Iowa to Windsor cost $70 and would take 3 weeks. Yes, there are ways around it (I think if you sent it FedEX Air FedEX would take care of customs) but do you know how expensive it is to ship a radiator by air? So, we either stopped offering it or we offered FedEX Air which was extremely expensive.
Problems with shipping to Canada:
;)
CBSA are notorious for holding up packages for weeks for customs clearance. Sometimes things "go missing."
Cross-border claims for goods damaged/missing in shipment are a giant hassle. In certain high-value businesses (like computer parts), there are plenty of fraudsters who take advantage of this, claiming goods never arrived and disputing the charges.
It doesn't matter to the merchant whether the recipient has committed fraud or the item has been stolen or destroyed in shipment or customs clearance - they still end up eating cost. Apparently this happens sufficiently often with trans-border shipments that a lot of computer vendors won't ship to foriegn countries, or even to "America Junior".
Compounding the issue are territorial reseller agreements - some manufacturers limit a reseller to domestic sales only. If you sell some items that you can't sell to a foreign buyer, it's often easier to reject all foreign orders than to have to check each order for said items.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
It's mostly our fault. We mericans have treated you Canadians like you are part of the US for so long, that now you're actually starting to believe it.
Sorry, you really are in a different country.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
I'm curious as to why some companies make it so difficult to ship to Canada (from the U.S.A.).
I don't know why, either, but I can suggest a practical work-around:
1. Find an elderly person in the Lower 48 states who takes a bunch of expensive prescriptions drugs. That's nearly any old person, so this part is easy.
2. Offer to ship the old fart some of your cheap Canadian versions of prescription drugs. Given the exorbitant prices of the same drugs in the U.S. will immediately agree to your proposal. Then have gramps ship you cheap American electronic products in exchange.
3. Profit!
(This comment is a satiric joke about the American health "care" system. It is not advocacy for or instruction in black market cross-border transactions. orthogonal is not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. orthogonal is not a doctor and this is not medical advice. Void where prohibited. orthogonal loves America and its great Christian Leaders King George Bush, Failed Marshall von Rumsfeld, and Inquisitor General John Ashcroft. Scaring peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty... only aid[s] terrorists [by eroding] our national unity and diminish[ing] our resolve. We have always been at war with Eastasia!)
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
What's funny is Companies that will allow you to select Canada as the country, pick from the available provinces, the only give you 5 chars to enter in a zip code. (In Canada we have a six character Postal Code).
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...
I live in Soviet Canuckistan you insensitive clod!
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.
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
...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!
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
I believe this was a reference to South Park's Terence and Phillip. SP seems to look up to Canada's social progressiveness.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
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.
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
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