If you really want a laugh, it is actually cheaper to use NONE of the above options. You ship for $9 to Blaine, Washington, where for $17 a sea-plane flies it to the airport 20-mins away from me. lol
Setup a freight forwarder in Blaine, Washington. It would make our life much easier.
I wasn't trying to berate you ShakeR, was just trying to figure out the current vagueness on your new site.
Our prices for 'Standard' should be set to Priority Mail cost. It appears the screen shot rate above is showing Priority Mail retail rates, which are usually $1 - $4 more than online rates.
If the prices are very close, we bump it up to Express for free.
Since DHL/FedEx/UPS are corporations, Canada taxes them on the value of imports. USPS is considered a government entity and Canadian residents are allowed to serve as their own 'shipping broker' (unique to every other country in the world - I think it's a good thing). These two things combined with a shipment valued at $200 or less does not require 'Duties' to be charged according to Canadian / United States trade agreements. As such, your effective cost on USPS shipments is much less. In terms of strict shipping cost UPS and FedEx are much cheaper. It's the duties that 'get ya'
Other things to keep in mind...
1) We, like every other online merchant, get charged 3 - 4% of every dollar you spend on the product and
shipping by PayPal / Visa / MC. So immediately, subtract 3 - 4% from whatever we charge for shipping from what we actually receive.
2) It takes, on average, about 5 - 10 minutes to process the label / packing documents of an International order due to all of the extra paperwork and information that needs to be filled out - manually. Compare this to about 20 - 30 seconds for a domestic order label which is almost entirely automated.
3) If we make a mistake on an order - it's rare, but it happens (we do have humans packing the boxes), a domestic order costs us about $16 - $20 in round-trip shipping to fix it. With International shipments to Canada it costs us $50 - $65 (cost to ship another keyboard and pay to ship the other one back) to make it right. When you start talking about Asia, Europe, and Australia it goes up to $70 - $100 round trip.
4) Administrative costs are exponentially higher for INT shipments. We get questions from Domestic customers hours after an order is placed asking for ETAs and tracking information (before the truck can even arrive to scan the package and email it to them later that day). Can you imagine how many emails we get from customers who have to wait 2 - 3 weeks for their order to arrive
Keep in mind, we don't have any problem answering these emails, but, as a business, we have to consider how much everything costs us to do.
The bottom line... We want a better, cheaper solution for INT shipments, but it currently doesn't exist. It drives me nuts that sellers in China can ship worldwide for $10 on eBay.
We've got the best we can offer (that is guaranteed to arrive) on the site, and as soon as a better alternative is available, we'll keep everyone posted!
