Yesterday I shipped out packages from my first Ebay sales in years. Back at Christmas I had bought a bunch of packs of this year's Hoops and Donruss from a Walmart nearby. I had good luck and I pulled a couple of Ja Morant rookie cards and a Zion Donruss rookie. I basically didn't think too much about them since Christmas and put them in away in a box.
This week I went through that box and pulled out a stack of cards that would sell for over $5 apiece, including the aforementioned Ja and Zion cards. I listed them on Ebay as BINs with best offers allowed. I sold the three basketball rookies, plus a Pete Alonso Topps Chrome rookie. I'm happy with the amount I got for them, and everything was smooth at that point.
What drove me nuts, though, was when it came time to ship cards. I haven't shipped in a long time and I don't pay close attention to changes in shipping costs. All I can say now is that it is prohibitively expensive to ship cards in Canada. I don't understand why Canada Post is so expensive.
I wanted to ship the cards with tracking information, because I have had bad experiences with buyer fraud on Ebay (as I noted in a previous post). Buying a tracking number in Canada is unrealistic, though. The cheapest option for tracking the shipment of one card within Canada was $14.25. That's more than the Ja Morant and Pete Alonso cards sold for.
It doesn't seem worth paying for tracking unless you are selling a card for $100 or more. I ended up shipping the cards regular mail for $1.94 each. Of course, I packaged them well, using a bubble mailer, penny sleeve, top loader, and team bag. But what I am worried about now is the buyer fraudulently requesting a refund, and I have no way of proving the cards were shipped because I have no tracking number.
There's gotta be a better way. Do Americans have this same problem when it comes to expensive shipping, particularly when it comes to tracking numbers? It seems like they don't and this is a Canada Post thing. I think in the future I would be better off shipping cards to COMC and using their Ebay service to auction cards. The problem is that COMC's auction service is only for higher value cards, and they are terribly backed up sorting their mail right now due to the pandemic anyway. It may also be better to sell those cards on the regular part of the COMC site, but that process is much slower and I find COMC to be better for flipping cards already listed (although I have sent cards to them in the past).
Now I am just crossing my fingers, hoping that my buyers are honest, and that Canada Post does it's job correctly and gets the cards to the buyers in a timely manner.
Buying cards from the US to be shipped to Canada is also awful. I usually use the COMC mailbox service, or if I am buying cards from Sportlots I use their mailbox service. I eat a bit more fees, but it still ends up being cheaper than simply having a card shipped directly from an American seller to me here in Canada. I don't remember the cost of shipping being that bad when I was into buying cards about ten years ago or so.
If you are a collector outside the United States, how do you go about saving on shipping costs, either as a buyer or a seller?
Welcome! Looking forward to reading you. Added you to my blogroll, hope you'll do the same.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely, I added you.
DeleteThat's pretty outrageous. Shipping is getting more expensive in the States too, but nowhere near that bad. With our Postal Service on the brink and possibly big changes coming, it would only get worse.
ReplyDeleteMaybe that's why Canada Post is so expensive, because it is a Crown Corporation (what we call government-owned companies in Canada) and it needs to pay for itself to stay alive. That makes shipping ungodly expensive. There are things I really like about Canada, but there are other things that I can't stand, and one of them is how expensive life is here relative to the US. This is just an example.
DeleteA. Arrived here from Jon's blog (A Penny Sleeve For Your Thoughts). Looking forward to reading and commenting on your posts.
ReplyDeleteB. Congratulations on pulling Zion and Morant rookie cards.
C. Shipping in general has gotten expensive over the past ten years... but it seems like shipping from the US to Canada has gotten exponentially expensive.
Thanks and thanks.
ReplyDeleteIt's crazy. It makes it harder to participate in the hobby, or any sort of collecting, if you live north of the border. I don't see how this is good for commerce for either country. It's frustrating, and I am glad for services like COMC and Sportlots.
I had heard that postage costs went up in Canada, but it's hard to imagine that they could be charging that much for tracking within the country! I can never figure why it's gotten so expensive to ship to Canada from the U.S., and vice-versa, I mean we're part of the same land mass, and are on fairly good relations, yet anything over an ounce or two seems to be ungodly expensive.
ReplyDeleteI feel like there is some sort of political or bureaucratic reason for the price hikes. I remember back in the early 2000s I used to buy and sell VHS tapes of pro wrestling and MMA and would be able to send a box of videotapes to the US for less than it costs now to send one baseball card. I know inflation is part of the reason, but shipping costs seem to have inflated above the consumer price index. You'd think it would be the other way around these days. with online shopping becoming the standard
DeleteIn the US I ship my eBay sales in bubble mailers, maybe 6"x10". Can ship to anywhere in the US first class, which includes tracking by default, for around $4 USD. I don't ship much to Canada the past few years because like you said it is simply astronomical even from the US to Canada.
ReplyDeleteI do worry though that $4 with tracking for US packages for me isn't sustainable. As previous commenters pointed out the USPS has been bleeding money for years and the pandemic makes it much worse. I think I'll be paying more than this in due time, maybe very soon...
You guys might end up with prices like ours. Perhaps Canada Post does not bleed money as badly as USPS, and that's why Canada Post is so expensive. It's really, really frustrating as a Canadian, though, because we have to purchase so much stuff from the US. If I limited my hobby spending to just dealing with other Canadians, for instance, I'm basically just a hockey card collector because that's literally all there is up here. Before the Raptors won the title, there were practically zero basketball cards available to buy here, for instance.
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