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International Sending from Canada
Hello, everyone! I'm new to BM, and so I have a few questions for Canadians who send either internationally or within Canada. 1) When sending to another country, do you mark the package as a gift? 2) Is it considered acceptable to send using a cheap method that doesn't give a tracking number? 3) What is the cheapest way to mail books within Canada? Any tips for packaging, sending options, etc. would be appreciated. Thank you so much! I look forward to hearing from you. :)
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Brittany
13 years ago
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Hi Eunice, welcome. Absolutely mark the books as "gift". That way no one has to pay duty. Send the cheapest way (surface). Up to 500 grams to the U.S. and up to 1 kg to anywhere else is quite reasonable so multi-mooches are a good idea. Within Canada, the only cheap option is for books 2 cm or less. Package as flat as possible in a envelope with flap, seams and edges reinforced with tape. If you are lucky, the postal clerk will let you send it as "letter". Otherwise, mail within Canada is crazily expensive. Outside your province is around $10 for paperback. I usually ask that my fellow Canadians mooch 3. Larger books I put in the condition notes that I will not mail them to fellow Canadians. If you live in the Toronto area you can go to a mooch meet and trade books that way, or arrange to meet another moocher somewhere to exchange books. The only other place in Canada I have heard that happening is in the Vancouver area. There aren't enough of us elsewhere. Check out my bio for other ideas and happy mooching!
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Thank you for the welcome, Cara! I sent out two books this week and marked as gifts, but just wanted to be sure on that point. I'm glad to know that books can occassionally be sent as lettermail, and that envelopes are okay to use. That's too bad, I would love to attend a meet and mooch...and I agree that our postage rates are interesting! Although I've never lived in the States, I wish we had their media mail options. Thank you so much for your response! :) Happy mooching to you as well!
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Hi all. I am also a Canadian newbie to BookMooch. I joined Venture in order to save money on my shipping supplies. Venture allows you to send expedited and I tried this once for $35.00. It took the book 6 weeks to arrive on a four day delivery due to customs and border services. I am overwhelmed at the difference in cost between what we Canadians pay to ship and what it costs someone in another country to send a book to Canada. Our cost is 100 - 150% more, generally $7.00 - $11.00 for a paperback. Our delivery time is longer. It takes my books 6 - 8 weeks to get anywhere outside Canada, but I recieve books from the US and GB in about 2 weeks - Go figure. (Ok I'm done now.) US Border services has opened 100% of the books I have received this year from the US. Some of these books arrived damaged in the process (torn covers and broken bindings) and packages aren't re-taped after opening. I am glad that they found (you guessed it) a used paperback book of $0.00 value as declared. :-)
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Hi, welcome to Bookmooch. If you send surface the prices are not usually that bad, especially if you encourage multi-mooches. If the books were coming *from* the States, wouldn't it have been Canadian Border Services checking the packages? Once the points for an international mooch go up to 3 it is going to make less and less financial sense for Canadians to use Bookmooch (sadly). Cara
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I have sent books as lettermail within Canada and to the US. As long as they are less than 500 g, and thinner than.79 inches. They can be mailed to the US as a letter since they are just paper. In that situation, do not fill out a customs form at all, just mail it as if it were a letter. I mailed a book that was just under 100 g for $1.03, and one that was between 100 and 200 g for $2.06.
IF you run into a clerk that won't allow you to do that, go to a different outlet, or purchase the stamps place the postage on, and stick it in a mailbox rather than dealing with the clerk. I learned this lesson, when I took a book up and was told it would be $8.57 to mail (not for bookmooch, just to a friend). I chose not to do it at that point, when I decided to do it I took it back to a postal outlet with my stamps already on it and the clerk looked at it and said " Why did you put so much postage, and I told her that it was because that was how much Karin (the other clerk) said it would be. She weighed it, and said you know it is just paper and without that customs form you can mail it as a letter for $ 3.60 ! You can bet I choose to do it that way now!!
When books are thicker than .79 inches it is cheaper to send to the US, and sometimes if it is over 300 g or so it is cheaper to send as a " small packet" rather than a letter.
I use the find a rate tool on the Canada Post website to determine that! ( handy if you have a kitchen scale, if not you can usually get the dimensions from amazon)
Hope that helps a bit!
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