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"The House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates (OGGO) would like to invite you to appear before the Committee in Winnipeg on Friday, October 21 from 8:30 a.m. until 9:30 a.m. in view of its study on Canada Post."
I get five minutes for a presentation and then they ask me questions.
Input. I need input. I really do not care what it is as I want all angles.
@cumos55 wrote:Here is a link to Canada Post Flex Delivery.... for parcels....
and...
as defined by Canada Post
FlexDelivery™ is an exclusive Canada Post service that allows you to have packages delivered to a post office of your choice. It’s convenient, secure and free. Use it when you need it! Each time you shop online, decide whether you want to have purchases shipped to a post office or to your regular home address.
This option will work well for people that have mail delivered to a Community Mailbox.....
That option works best for people who DON`T have a community mailbox and don`t want it left in plain view outside their front door. Why would you want a package held at the post office that could be not very close and has inconvenient hours when you can retrieve it from your community mailbox 24-7 within a hundred metres or so of your front door.
Flex Delivery would be good for when you are at the cottage for two weeks and would like your order to be available locally instead of going to your regular location which might be a few hundred km`s away.
I made my presentation to the House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates (OGGO) study on Canada Post Hearings this morning in Winnipeg. I am very grateful for having been given the opportunity to do so.
The hearings in Winnipeg were held from 8:30 am to 11:30 am at the Victoria Inn near our airport, and this afternoon, the hearing moves to Scanterbury which is near to Brokenhead Ojibway Nation north of Winnipeg. (Home of decorated WW2 hero Sgt. Tommy Prince.)
Only two participants attended my 8:30 to 9:30 am time slot: myself and Nelson Leong, COO of Manitobah Mukluks, so we had the seven-member panel to ourselves. We each had five minutes to give our opening statement followed by the seven minutes per panel member for questions. This meant each member of the committee posed at least one question to me which was almost equal parts intimidating and flattering since I was able to speak to my selling experience with Canada Post as if I were a peer to the gentleman on my left who was in attendance representing a company with $15 million in annual sales.
It also meant that in answering the questions of committee members that I could cover more ground than I was able in my five-minutes of remarks. These questions ran the gamut from Community Mailboxes to postal banking to the moratorium on closing rural corporate locations to ideas we may have for sustainability in the future for Canada Post.
I was very glad at that point that I had taken the time to read their 133-page report called Canada Post in the Digital Age since it allowed me to give intelligent answers. (Or so I hope.)
Where the Community Mailboxes question was concerned, I am pleased to report that I was able to offer both my own personal beliefs in that to-door delivery needs to remain as it is while freely admitting this was not an opinion shared by the majority of my fellow ebay sellers who regarded it as a waste of CPC resources. Wherever I answered a question which had conflicting opinions between how I felt things should be versus what I am aware other ebay sellers do not, I was clear to indicate both sides as such.
I was also asked pointe-blank about services like ChitChat and whether I had investigated such an option and I said I had not but only because none are available in Winnipeg, and that those sellers in locations within Canada with access to the service do use it wherever possible. I noted this had an internal impact on handling time for sellers and also spoke about the mechanics of ebay's Seller Handling Time commitments to avoid Late Shipment Defects.
In closing, we presenters were given an additional ten days to submit supplemental information to support our remarks, should we wish. I'll have to think what (if anything) I might want to say as follow-up.
For anyone who is interested, the following is the important part of my presentation, skipping the introduction since you already know who I am. I had to have it submit to the committee five business days in advance so it could be translated into both official languages and I must say that the real-time interpretation between French and English at the hearing was nothing less than extremely impressive.
House of Commons Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates
Canada Post Corporations hearing in Winnipeg, Manitoba
Friday, Oct. 21 8:30 to 9:30 am
While currently I have more than a thousand items available for sale, I consider myself a small-time seller on the Small and Medium Business spectrum, but the income is nonetheless necessary to my family’s well-being. I am mother of four, and my partner is self-employed, so every penny counts in our household. I would assume this is the case for many small sellers on ebay, regardless of their ages or other circumstances. We are supplementing our modest incomes with ebay sales.
To date, my store has shipped about 1500 orders through Canada Post Corporation. Postage paid is my largest single expense. By the end of this calendar year, I expect that amount to exceed $20,000. Approximately 90 per cent of postage for my customers is purchased through ebay’s arrangement with PayPal shipping to gain a modest discount through their volume-customer contract while the remainder is spent on domestic lettermail directly at my nearest authorized postal agent.
As I read through the discussion paper, Canada Post in the Digital Age, I noted with interest many of the issues it detailed, and I thank you for preparing that report, and for allowing me to be here today to speak about my dependance on the healthy operation of our national postal system. Without Canada Post, I lose the ability to conduct business as an online seller.
Believe me, over this past summer, I tried to shake my dependance on Canada Post. Unlike many of my counterparts on ebay, I made a conscious decision NOT to close my store during the long period there was uncertainty about the labor situation. I developed a contingency plan, and I put it into operation: to offer local pickup for regional sales, courier service for domestic orders, and daytrips south to utilize USPS for international sales. Considering that a roundtrip to the United States to mail a parcel is for me a 232-km journey, you must understand this was a decision that I did not make lightly.
Even so, half of my customers are Canadians and they avoided, as did I, all shopping online through the summer. This has extended into Fall. Normally, by mid-to late October, my sales are brisk. With the holiday season approaching, my business is still floundering. Canadian small businesses need CPC and CUPW to develop a long-term arrangement that will provide consistent, reliable service to all Canadians. The disruption that labour strife causes extends beyond the strife itself.
The other half of my customers are international: a nearly equal split between USA and overseas. Those customers, for the most part, remained blissfully unaware of our labor strife.
Which brings me to a sore point: the cost of service by tracked packet. No one believes it costs three times as much to mail something via Tracked Packet than it does Small Packet Airmail when both generate the same barcodes and are scanned and entered into CPC’s system at the counter. If the issue is one of liability, please instead reduce or eliminate the amount of included insurance with tracked packet and leave that up to the individual seller to purchase at additional cost. Having insurance included is not value-added for most sellers since it’s not usually the tracked items that get ‘lost’ en route to their destination. We need Delivery Confirmation more than insurance. And we need it to be affordable.
When put to other ebay users the question of what they wanted me to offer you today, there was raised a hue and cry of ‘more affordable tracking, and more trackable options’. It is difficult if not impossible for Canadian sellers to be competitive against our American counterparts. The price of postage puts us at a steep disadvantage. This goes across the board but is most glaring with the absence of a traced lettermail category between regular domestic lettermail and a full-fledged parcel. We are asking for Delivery Confirmation for an extra dollar or two on oversize lettermail that still ships in an envelope under two cm-thick.
We can all see that parcels are the way of the future. E-commerce is the way of the future. Tracked solutions are the way of the future: buyers expect tracking, sellers expect tracking, and sales platforms require it for logistical metrics.
I can say with all confidence that all ebay sellers with which I have discussed the issues facing Canada Pos think the same thing: Let us grow together, not apart.
And then I threw in a Small to Tracked Packet comparison to justify my comment about how they are the same service plus or minus the word 'tracked' with a side order of USPS thrown in.
It really was a wonderful learning experience and, thanks to the overwhelming support of the members of the panel, I really feel that they are listening with interest to the things that their witnesses are telling them. Indeed, they told me and the COO of Manitobah Mukluks (with might be one of the biggest local-grown business success stories in my province) time and time again how very much they valued hearing from businesses like ours since we are such key stakeholders.
Remember, I do have an extra ten days to submit supplemental information so if there is anything glaring that many of you feel I overlooked, please shout out.
Thanks to you all for your support with this.
Maureen
Also, if I may, there are only a few short hours left to complete their online survey. All the information being collected at present will be used to prepare a report for the next stage of this endeavour.
http://www.parl.gc.ca/Committees/en/OGGO/StudyActivity?studyActivityId=8913079
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