@sylviebee wrote:
EBay.ca and the Canadian Post Office knew this was coming for 6 months, yet they put nothing into place to make it go smoothly.
That procrastination will cost eBay and the PO dearly. eBay and the PO chose to loose all business which involved Canadians shipping to the States, rather than get on top of the situation and put something into place which allowed for the collection of tariffs.
What eBay, Canada Post, and the rest of us didn't know until very recently was that tariffs were expected to be paid before shipment in all circumstances. What sellers had been generally agonizing over before then was how to incorporate the tariffs into the sale if they chose a shipping option that allowed for that, or they'd been agonizing over how US buyers might react to having to pay tariffs upon receipt of the item if they chose to continue to ship through the postal system.
There are other postal systems that are dealing with this issue by simply halting all shipments to the United States. Canada Post actually reacted to this issue surprisingly quickly (especially when you consider that it has contract negotiations going on at the same time) by international standards. Its solution may not be practical for some if not most eBay sellers, but this is a very difficult situation that requires difficult solutions.
@sylviebee wrote:
How hard could that be? eBay.ca would simply have to follow the eBay.com model which has been collecting tariffs from Canadians for quite some time.
eBay has been collecting squat from Canadian buyers. Assuming you're referring to sales that have been shipped through the Global Shipping Program and eBay International Shipping, that collection (or, more accurately, payment through the shipper that's in turn been reimbursed by the buyer) has been mostly for taxes, and perhaps duty in some circumstances, and it's been the shipper that's been handling that, not eBay. Taxes, duties, and tariffs have not been charged and collected by eBay on sales to Canadian buyers by non-Canadian sellers because eBay has not been empowered to do so by Canadian law.
@sylviebee wrote:
Shipping by UPS is tricky. UPS recently charged one of my customers US$600 for a US$1,400 item. That was for antiques which weren’t subject to duty at the time. (They are now.). There should have been no added charge.
I'm not singling you out on this, but I'm finding that in these discussions that a lot of people are interchangably using or confusing the terms "taxes", "duties", and "tariffs" and they're different things. Even before Trump took office, a US$1400 item could well have been subject to duty depending on its country of manufacture and if it lacked any sort of documentation to attest to the item's age as its value was above the duty-free threshold (US$800) for a casual import.
@sylviebee wrote:
There are other couriers, but for now I’m still aghast at the way eBay.ca and our own PO has painted us into this corner.
If anyone here can help point me in the right direction that would be very much appreciated.
This problem was Trump's making. The convention and perhaps even internal law is that tariffs on imports are paid by the importer. Trump seems to be trying to get around this by forbidding DDU (delivered duty unpaid) shipments to the United States, a development that is extremely recent. I don't think eBay Canada and Canada Post can be faulted for trying to make sense of a declaration that makes no sense in terms of international conventions and laws. Perhaps a more workable solution will come in the next month or two, but it's a matter of waiting. Neither eBay Canada nor Canada Post had six months to come up with solutions to this.
As to workable solutions for you, you may want to read some of the other threads on this board, but I get the sense that the majority opinion right now is that it's probably best to cease offering shipping to the United States, at least in the short term.
