Hi - here's the situation from my point of view.
I sell primarily from Taiwan in Asia (not quite the same as China!) worldwide - and a main problem recently, which had worsened in 2015, and now in 2016 seems even worse - is that stardard airmailed packages to Canada used to take 1-3 weeks (same as USA) whereas they now commonly take over 1 month. Possibly 2 months now or soon in some cases.
I believe that its due to customs delays (and maybe or maybe not domestic postal delays) because of some new Canadian policy since around late 2014.
Its a major problem which this year I started warning all customers in Canada about, but now, because of two problems, I am putting them in the same basket as South America, Italy, Spain and Portugal - I will not mail there without the customer paying an extra $3 (our cost) for registered mail. (our items are too small to afford paying it ourself - more importantly all other western countries don't need it)
The problems forcing this are two-fold:
1. Ebay forces refunds when customers open cases and are unwilling to communicate or wait, even when I've forewarned them about delays (this happens sometimes - not all customers are heartless to us).
2. When an impatient customer (who I've communicated with) appeals to close the case and refund, eBay makes the decision before I can make the refund myself, and then I get a mark against my account rating for "unresolved cases". This risks restricting and ruining my entire account! (not that ebay even cares about their own loss of revenue)
So in a nutshell, its a shame for Canada, and for businesses selling to them from Asia. Also eBay isn't on the ball about the situation (typical).
Can anyone shed any light on if there has been any changes in policy by the Canadian government, or customs services, with respect to packages from China/Asia? (I know they cancelled a huge amount of Chinese visas to deal with the immigration/real estate problems around 2014).
And for what its worth - I don't think Chinese/Asian sellers are becoming or are less trustworthy - from my experience this is a delivery time issue unique to Canada I'm afraid.
I hope this information or perspective is useful, and I hope to hear peoples thoughts or point of view 🙂
