I occasionally sell items on eBay and this morning, a potential customer contacted me to inquire about shipping a clock (parcel weighs just over three pounds) to Portugal. I headed to the on-line Canada Post parcel calculator for a quote and this is what I discovered:
· Small Packet International Surface - $21.07 – no insurance option – would take approximately a month and a half to arrive.
· International Parcel – Surface – now coming up at $40.62 (but half an hour ago was $37.79). This would also take a month and a half to arrive but you do have the option of buying up to $1000 worth of insurance.
· Small Packet International –Air -$50.26 including $100 insurance but no option to purchase any additional insurance!
· X-Press Post International - $77. 22 (half an hour ago coming up at $73!) – seven day delivery supposedly guaranteed and insurance.
Alas, I have used surface overseas mail before and there is no way these parcels arrive in the time frame Canada Post suggests. The last one took almost three months! So for a difference of $10.00 ($12.00 half an hour ago), the only possibility would be the Small Packet International Air for $50, except for one thing – no additional insurance option. Surely I was misunderstanding this. How could the cheaper surface shipping be insurable but not the air mail? It made no sense.
So, I called the Customer Service 800 number and indeed, I was reading the webpage correctly. Only up $100 insurance for the air mail parcel is allowed but up to $1000 on the cheaper surface option. Why? The best answer I could get was “because it was a Small Packet”, although the size of the parcel did not change for any of the other quotes. When the representative suggested my best option was the X-Press Post for $77.22, I asked who in their right mind would pay $77.00, and her answer was to say “that was none of their concern”!
And that is where the problem lies. Have any of these rates been established by anyone using a single realistic thought? Perhaps Canada Post should be concerned about such ridiculous rates and policies, especially considering what a boon on-line auctions have been to postal systems in general, and since these rates have a significant impact on Canadians being able to compete in the world-wide marketplace. Sending the information on to my potential customer in Portugal, I felt like a complete idiot. In order to have adequate insurance, he either will have to pay in excess of $77 or be prepared to wait for months to receive his item. Have I heard back from him? Of course not!
And one final consideration...Ebay is now charging their final value fee based on the selling price as well as the shipping amount. In part, the intention is to encourage sellers to offer reasonable shipping charges to their customers. Since “reasonable” is not any part of Canada Post’s mandate, we clearly have a problem.
