high shipping cost

[peterfl]

I have a small business. I am going to mail my products to my clients. the price of my product is $5. but the cost for shipping it from ON to BC is $9 for this small regular parcel. any idea or advice for cheaper shipping for small items within Canada? thanks

[kaos25000]

I asked for the Small Entrepreneur card at Canada Post. It gives you around 3% off and another 3% if you purchase your shipping on the net. Other than that, I too would like to know of other ways to save on shipping.

[Gee]

The card is called Priority One. Probably the best deal going around.

The only cheap method of shipping. If your item will fit thru a mail slot, just use regular mail.

[Kasakato]

Send it LetterPost. Theres no point of insuring and tracking a $5 package.

[sjweyman]

Send it LetterPost. Theres no point of insuring and tracking a $5 package.

What are the dimension restrictions on that and how much does it cost. I've never had an agent offer me a really reduced letterpost rate unless the package is really small and could be passed off for an oversized letter.

[peterfl]

Thank you guys very much!the responses are really helpful. the biggest saving will be achieved if I can combine all the ideas together. appreciate very much!

[zoro69]

letter mail if its under 2cm thick and under 500 gm. no discount with venture 1 card for letter mail.

Bigger then that...and you pretty much can't sell $5 items by mail order in Canada. Venture 1 card gets a measly 5% off (+3 % if done online)...which doesn't make much difference with Canada post rates. Real discounts (not enough to effect the viability of mailing $5 item) start by committing to 750 parcels per year.

[Jokez Guy]

You have to do extremely high amount of volumes to get a good discount from Canada post. What we are doing is we got a corporate account with canada post we called them up and we basically use the computer prints out labels stick them and ship them off. Basically we save about 7 to 8% like that, but hopefully by next month we are going to be a Level 2 corporate account of shipping so we should hopefully save more then that, but still shipping to Vancouver from Toronto is still expensive without corporate account small package is like 10$? with it you will be looking to be paying about 8$ and some change. Level one account you need to do about 700 to 1200 packages shipped in a year. Anyways give them a call and see what they could do for you

[sjweyman]

It's comforting to know that I'm not the only one who is paying these rates. I've tried finding discounts before to no avail. I have found certain ways to save a little money but nothing that significant.

If you are part of the memberworks program you can buy your postage or prepaid mailers at Staples for a 20% discount. However, you'll lose your small business discount doing it that way I think as well as the online discount. You can also buy the prepaid mailer value packs (4 in a pack) to get an additional 5% off. Sometime the prepaid mailers are cheaper than regular postage on small packets that can't be mailed lettermail but aren't too pick to fit in the prepaid box. Plus it is Xpresspost so it gets there faster.

[fastalan]

Well... anyone interested to join force and increase our buying power to group order these Canada Post prepaid product? I've done 1K and 2K lot before, but to get any kind of significant pricing, one will need to commit to a 5k lot order. You get 20-25 business sharing out this lot than this will work.