For years a large part of our business model has relied on shipping items such as DVDs, certain video games, comic books, CDs and other items that are eligible for Lettermail within Canada. Said items would be shipped using Tracked Packet to the USA or Internationally.
The Lettermail method of shipping within Canada is extremely cost effective to the extent that many items are only competitive when shipped via Lettermail.
Since eIS uses the domestic shipping on file when an international buyer places an order, we now have a problem. The eIS program requires that we use a trackable method. Lettermail is non-trackable. More than a third of our items only offer Lettermail as the domestic option.
We were enrolled in the eIS program on October 9 and made our first sale this morning (a Blu-ray). Unfortunately, the item in question offers Lettermail as the domestic shipping option. We charged $6 for Lettermail in this case. All of the tracked shipping methods available to us generally cost $18 or more for an item of this size.
We aren't willing to eat that cost, so we decided to cancel the transaction. This is not something we want to do because if we start cancelling transactions over and over it could lead to an account suspension.
We decided to check the eBay Shipping Label prices for the item before cancelling the transaction and were met with a potentially good surprise.
Shipping the Blu-ray from Halifax to the Mississauga hub via eIS is only $8 for Canada Post Expedited Parcel with eBay Shipping Labels for the item in question (in this case a parcel weighing 200 g in a 22 cm x 16 cm x 12 cm box). Knowing this, we are going to eat the $2 and give this a shot.
We checked to see what it would cost to ship a record using a record mailer (600 g in a 33 cm x 33 cm x 4 cm box) and the Canada Post Expedited Parcel price came up as $9.
The UPS prices were also less than expected, but were several dollars more than the Canada Post options in the tests we did.
If this is accurate, then it suggests that eBay and Canada Post (as well as UPS) have made deals on cheaper shipping to the hub and haven't made an announcement as of yet.
We realize that we are among the earliest invitees to the program. Has anyone else had a sale via eIS yet? If so, what is your experience in terms of shipping prices to the hub using eBay Shipping Labels?
