To follow up on a comment left on our blog we thought we would look into the price differential on a pair of basketball shoes. I was thinking minimal savings at first since most pairs of shoes are not that expensive to begin with. What I learned was something completely different and after asking a few friends I later found out that most Canadian basketball players pay outragous amounts of money for the exact same pair of shoes that Americans are getting for much less.
Let’s take the Lebron VII’s for example (shown below).
In Vancouver the Lebron VII’s are being sold for $249.99. You will find them at the local foot locker in the Metropolis At Metrotown mall in Burnaby. Funny thing is you may find these pair of shoes in Toronto and Montreal but will have a very hard time finding them anywhere else in Canada. I then went to my best friend Google and searched for where I could purchase these shoes online. I found them on www.eastbay.com for a mere $159.99. Since the dollar is at par right now the conversion doesn’t make a difference. The only other fees I needed to check out was Duty and shipping so I dug a bit further.
I entered my Canadian shipping address and the shipping fees were $12, but I had to wait 20 days minimum to get my new pair of sneakers. The big cost was Duty. There is an estimated $40 on Duty when shipping the shoes into Canada so the savings are not looking overly glamorous at this point to ship them straight to my home in Canada. If you chose to get a US shipping address and ship them to the border then you would pay $7 in shipping and more often times than not you will not be charged the duty. You would only need to pay taxes at the border which would be estimated to be $35. You would need to pay the taxes on your purchase here as well so no big difference here.
I also learned that some sites such as www.finishline.com do not ship to Canadian customers at all. This website has amazing deals and the Lebron VII’s ship to anywhere in the U.S. for free! These types of websites are ideal for finding a U.S. shipping address and having your purchases shipped to the border. Why should us Canadians live without certain items because they don’t ship here?
To conclude on this basketball shoe research we found that Canadians that ship thier shoes to the border would save roughly $65-70. This includes gas to drive to the border and taxes. I don’t know about you but that’s a lot of money to me. If this is the price differential on just a pair of basketball shoes then just think of what other items you could save on!
<<update: To find a U.S. Shipping Address visit www.kinek.com/border and sign up to get a Kinek#.>>