Grr! How can some tea companies charge me $30 to ship to Canada and others $8????

85 Replies
darby select said

I think the main problem is that some companies don’t want to ship first class because it does not offer tracking. According to our post we have to ship Express to track and that is expensive! I sell on ebay and will only ship Express because PayPal won’t cover you with tracking. When I’m shipping to tea friends I use first class. I shipped out samples to canada and France last week and it cost $8-$13 for first class

Dexter said

Then there is still another option. I get tracking – I got tracking with my last Mandala order – I ordered A LOT of tea and the actual shipping cost was just over 16.00.
A friend here on steepster sends me boxes of tea with about 13.00 worth of postage on the label and she sends me tracking. I still don’t believe that it can cost some people/companies reasonable amounts and others INSANE amounts….

TeaLady441 said

I think I was discussing this with Stacy at Butiki a few months ago and she told me that if you ship International First Class you can get tracking – it says “Tracking is available to certain countries when used in conjunction with Electronic Delivery Confirmation.”
I don’t know how that works, but it sounds like the retailer could ship to Canada (at least) using First Class AND still have a tracking number.

http://ircalc.usps.com/PopUps/FCMIParcel.htm

Dexter said

I agree Cavo – I’ve bought tea from two companies in the last few days – both are sending it First Class International and I got tracking in both cases. This seems to be the “reasonable” shipping option. Express is just way too expensive.

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Every dollar it costs to ship is a dollar less you can spend on tea :(

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teajoteas said

To give you another tea company perspective, we keep it simple:

- $10 flat rate for shipping to Canada.
- $3.75 flat rate shipping within the U.S.

No calculators, no worrying about weight, etc. It gets too complicated and customers get turned off.

Dexter said

I’m just going to give that a thumbs up.
As a consumer, I don’t have to guess or play with a cart trying guess what works the best. Thank you for telling me up front what shipping is so that I can decide right away how much I need to order to make shipping worthwhile. :))

teajoteas said

The only way we can do this is ship First Class International. Priority mail to Canada is just too expensive. Hopefully, you would rather wait a few more days than pay out the nose for tea!

Dexter said

Will always wait the extra couple of days. Really though the amount of time that it takes a package to get to me depends more on customs than it does with the shipping method. I’ve had customs hold a package for less than a day and hold other ones more than a week. The vendor has no control over customs.

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