Quote:
Originally Posted by RyZ
I bought some product out of the US about a month ago for my wife's Bday. The stuff was cheaper there than anywhere I could find it online here in Canada. They charged me $40 shipping at the online store and then UPS charged me another $45 to take it from the border to my house. It cost me over $160 to get $75 worth of product to my house. I won't be making that mistake again.
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I suppose you got hit with the notorious UPS 'brokerage fees'? I feel your pain. I like shopping online, especially now with the high Canadian dollar, so I've learned a couple things about cross-border shipping. What UPS is charging you for is the service of looking up the customs code and declaring your package for you. Then they pay any taxes and customs and bill it back to you, but the catch is that they charge you an exorbitant fee for performing this service for you. If you want, you can phone UPS and tell them not to do it for you and you'll do it yourself, which you're perfectly entitled to do. It is quite a pain, however.
My advice is to ship with USPS (United States Postal Service), even if the cost of shipping is higher. If you do, they seamlessly hand it off to Canada Post once it costs the border. That way any customs work is covered by our taxes dollars and all you have to pay any applicable taxes or customs and usually a $5 'handling fee' (which is dumb, but beats the hell out of UPS).
As for what kind of duty you can expect to pay on an item here's a
link to a page on the Canadian Border Services that lists what kind of duty you can expect to pay on certain items. Note that there are a number of things that you can bring into Canada duty free, which really lend themselves to cross-border shopping.