Quote:
Originally Posted by blankall
On top of that you have:
1) Duty.
2) Distribution/licensing agreements. Canada is notorious for companies having oligopoly/monopoly style licensing agreements.
3) Added transportation overhead.
4) Less competition.
5) Added overhead in terms of real estate, fuel costs, labour costs, taxes, etc...
Canada is overall less conducive to business than the USA. The result is increased costs to the consumer.
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Some of these are possible for the most part its just that Canada is a small market compared to the US or UK/Europe so its not worth going through all of the overhead registrations and business agreements to distribute your product in Canada if you're smaller business.
Duty differences are pretty small (although they are some tariffs i.e. Steel imports that make it hard to import those products to Canada). For the most part you'd just set-up a distribution agreement with someone in Canada and not bother with real estate or distribution staff - you'd add a few sales people maybe.
So you end up with some products that you can find online that aren't really intended to be sold in Canada so these companies charge crazy prices online since they have no competition. With Amazon its no guarantee you're even getting the same product that is being sold in the US. It could be some cheap fraudulent Chinese product.
Amazon is a wild west with these fraudulent companies (whether selling fraudulent products or selling products where they aren't intended to be sold) so unless you want to be chasing these 3rd party selling companies constantly, you pretty much just have to deal with it. You can get one shut down on Amazon and they'll be back in two days under different company name.