Anyway

I see Dave Shea has been explain­ing why he does­n’t typ­ic­ally order goods online; I’ve ordered lots of goods online and had mixed exper­i­ences. I usu­ally only buy online if 1) I can­’t find what I’m look­ing for loc­ally, or 2) it’s sub­stan­tially cheap­er than buy­ing loc­ally. I also make sure of war­ranty implic­a­tions for any­thing I buy that might need one (e.g., my Tung­sten).

I tend to give the nod to Cana­dian retail­ers because of the hassles Dave talks about and also because I like to sup­port loc­al or semi-loc­al small busi­nesses (although I have bought enough at Amazon that the reg­u­lar “you might be inter­ested in” emails give a remark­ably con­son­ant view into my cur­rent interests). I buy books at Amazon.com if I’m not in a hurry to get them and if they’re cheap­er, includ­ing ship­ping, than buy­ing the same books loc­ally. This is often the case right now since books have the price prin­ted on the back, and the Cana­dian dol­lar is cur­rently worth quite a lot more com­pared to the US dol­lar than when lots of the books were printed. 

Although I haven’t had any­thing shipped by them for some time, I agree with Derek Miller, who advises avoid­ing UPS if at all pos­sible; I’ve found UPS in the past to be very quick to charge double fees if two boxes in the same ship­ment are labelled with the total (they charge as if each box had the total value). What I do to try to get around that prob­lem is to either call or email the place I’m order­ing from if I think there’s a chance they might put things into more than one box, and dis­cuss the issue with them. The res­ult is that I haven’t had that par­tic­u­lar prob­lem for a few years now. Com­pan­ies that don’t answer the phone or email don’t get my custom.

Recent exper­i­ences that I’ve had with order­ing from out­side Canada:

• books from a couple of small retail­ers in the US com­ing via Canada Post: no extra charges
• two baby slings hand-made by a small retail­er in the US com­ing via Canada Post: no extra charges
• quite a few books from Amazon.de com­ing through Canada Post: charged GST and asso­ci­ated oth­er fees about half the time
• books from Amazon.com com­ing via Canada Post: occa­sion­ally charged GST etc. If you request pri­or­ity ship­ping, Amazon col­lects an Import Fees Depos­it to cov­er the vari­ous charges (I guess to save time in delivery)
• buy­ing a humid­i­fi­er from Venta Air­wash­er: this is a longer story. I called up to order rather than using the web­site, to dis­cuss the deliv­ery issues. They charged me GST and when I said I found that odd since they’re a US store, they assured me everything would be fine. And to call back and let them know if it was­n’t. Sure enough, the humid­i­fi­er (great humid­i­fi­er, BTW) showed up with no extra charges and I was pleas­antly sur­prised. Until the bill from Fed­ex arrived in the mail a week later. I called the com­pany, com­plained, they said they’d take care of it, I called Fed­ex to tell them what was hap­pen­ing, did­n’t pay the bill, and haven’t heard any­thing in the year since, so I assume Venta did take care of it.

In the unex­pec­ted-but-in-the-end-ok cat­egory: I ordered a DVD from BBC Canada, and was charged the nor­mal GST etc. The prob­lem here was that they shipped the DVD from the US, and Canada Post promptly charged me $12 for GST, duties, etc., des­pite the envel­ope hav­ing a “GST paid” stamp on it. I called BBC Canada to com­plain and they cred­ited my cred­it card with the $12. I hope they got the money back from Rev­en­ue Canada; at least I did­n’t have to pay.