If you don't have close access to the US border and places like Chitchats to be feasible, you will likely need to work with Canada Post rates, and perhaps UPS/Fedex. Buying labels through eBay provides a decent discount versus over the counter. If buying through Canada Post, go to a postal outlet and get a free Small Business care, which gives a small discount. There really is no magic bullet to get the rates down much more than that if you don't have access to a Chitchats type business.
The big positive with Canada Post is that for packages under 2KG, they ship flat rate to anywhere in the US including Hawaii, Alaska, and territores like Guam and PR with US Tracked Packet or Small Packet (untracked). The difference between Tracked and Small Packet is minimal so most folks go with Tracked.
As an example, these are the current rates for Tracked Packet - the first column is grams and kilograms, the 2nd column is the total rate in CDN$. The rates fluctuate a bit every month.
| to .100 | 9.72 |
| to .250 | 11.92 |
| +.251 + .5 | 16.45 |
| .5 to 1 | 24.24 |
| 1 to 1.5 | 27.95 |
| 1.5+ | 31.07 |
When you sell to the US from Canada on .com, you do not have the option to have calculated shipping using Canadian shippers as that only works for shippers based in the US, so you need to put in a fixed shipping amount. This is why the Tracked packet flat rate is so important.
For chitchats, you can get price estimates without signing in here:
https://chitchats.com/pricing I find that they are good for small light items, and for some larger heavy items. Really large and heavy parcels, they can be more expensive than Canada Post. If you are shipping items to Chitchats from out of town, I would check the rates from Sendle Canada as they will ship up to 5 KG, 25L for $12.65 regionally to $17.90 nationally, depending on location. https://try.sendle.com/en-ca/pricing If Sendle serves your area, they also pick up at your door as they use ICS courier.
You can also check out a service like https://www.netparcel.com/home.action which basically has large corporate volume rates with a number of shippers so similar to Sendle. I think there are some other cross border companies for just Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver but I am not familiar with them - which if you were going to ship to Chitchats, they could be an option.
Something to consider if you are coming back to Canada and shipping from a Canadian location, is your Managed Payments bank account. I assume that you are living in the US so have a US bank account. When Managed Payments was implemented we had to specifically have a chequing account to receive payouts that was with a Canadian Bank. Even if we chose to receive US$, it had to be a Canadian Bank. I don't know if that will be an issue if you change your location address to Canada.
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