Forum Moderators: buckworks
I was wondering if there are any examples of canadian based ecommerce sites that are competiting with US based stores.
There is this very discouraging voice inside of me that keeps telling me that I could never compete with US based sites (unless ofcourse I am targetting the canadian market) due to extra shipping costs and possible duty on products.
I remember asking some canadian based ecomm site about duty and they said it is usually around 12%...which seems to be a very large chunk of profits.
I know drop-shipping is an option but I always like the idea of having more control over my business.
thoughts? ideas? encouragement *smirk*?
First on Duty.
The USA has something called a section 321, which says, its not worth the trouble of US customs agents to collect duties on parcels under $200 American.
Most of our goods are shipped under $200 (product), and the remainder are considerid NAFTA goods. In seven years, we only had one American who was ever charged customs duties. Plus the Americans don't pay any sales tax or use tax from shipments arriving from Canada.
American companies trying to ship to Canada are at a disadvantage, as Canada Customs are to stupid to understand that it is not in the tax payers interest to spend $20.00 in time and salaries to collect $2.00 worth of Duty or GST. If American companies ship anything worth more than $20, the canadian customer is going to get charge duties, GST and canada post handling fees ($6.00) or brokerage ($19.00 plus) if shipped by courier.
On shipping, Canada Post can ship by ExpressPost USA, with delivery times of 4 to 7 days, which is close to what UPS can do (2 -5 days), or better yet find a drop shipper in the USA and you can compete on even footing on time and price.
Shipping delays are ussally not a problem, Canada Post, UPS, Purolator and FedEX has about the same track record in losing or delayed parcels.
The big thing to remember as a Canadian, is you need to do patriotic spoofing, or in other words make your site look American for Americans. Make sure Americans are served up with American prices, and better yet get a US address thru one of the mail forwarding services. Use geotargeting software to serve up Canadian pages to Canadians, and American pages to Americans.
World geography is not taught in the US school system,
(or it is not mandatory), which leads to a higher percentage of Americans to be less worldly than Canadians, and less likely to buy from a non-american website. Im not trying to shoot anybody down, it just what I found from 7 years of web stats. That is why the patriotic spoofing is important.
Make sure you host on a US hosting company in the USA, as search engines will give you a poorer ranking if you host from Canada. Hosting is much cheaper in the USA anyways.
Remember, our good neighboors to the south outnumber us 9 to 1, so its best to tap this market.
Just go for it.....
We drop ship within the US so the border is really a non-issue for us....
Thanks for the input guys.
Yes I know if I drop ship products I am at a equal footing, I was really referring to stocking my own products.
In my opinion, the key is to find niche products that are not available or hard to find in the USA. If you have something that people there want, but can't easily get, you will clean up.
