If you landed here you are most likely a Canadian looking for a place to ship your purchase to on the U.S. border. Not to worry, we have lots of information to share and I bet there are many of you that have tips of your own, so please feel free to share them with us in the comment sections after each post. You can also send us tips or questions by clicking on the “contribute” button in the right hand column of the site.
I personally order items from the United States and have them shipped to the border all the time. Once my orders arrive at the border, I simply drive down and pick them up myself. This saves me from paying expensive brokerage fees to shipping companies in order to have them bring it across the border for me. Shipping the item to a US address also lets me order from all sorts of great companies that don’t ship to Canada. Even if the item I am ordering is available in Canada, I can typically save considerable money by ordering from the US and having the item shipped to a US shipping address. The savings are significant even after factoring in the cost of gas to drive there and back.
It still amazes me how much you can save by shipping to thee border, and how many people either don’t know about it, or don’t know how to go about doing it. The purpose of this site is to share this type of information with other Canadians, along with all sorts of other cross border shopping tips and info. Again, if you have any questions or tips of your own, give us a shout! We’re always happy to hear from our readers.
We will be updating this website constantly with more information about cross border shopping, USA shipping addresses, brokerage information, and much more. Stay tuned and stay informed!
Great idea, I love it, but I have some questions.
How do we get around the fact that so many of these jokers refuse to ship to an address that isn’t the address on your PayPal account, or the one on your VISA account?
I went to amazon.com and found some car speakers which apparently list for $549, and one of amazon’s “Marketplace sellers” is offering them for $105. They refuse to ship to Canada, and when I proposed shipping to an address just across the border, or even to a relative’s address in the US (my folks are visiting my sister there and could bring them back for me) they completely ignored it and just blew me off. Just a flat “no”. Guess our American dollars aren’t good enough for them.
Tried bidding on a car amp on eBay last week, Complete waste of time. My bids would not even register because I guess the seller had ticked the box that says he would only ship to the US. He finally allowed as how he would deign to send it to my relatives even though PayPal said not to, but by that time the bidding had closed and I was left feeling the way I usually do when dealing with these arrogant, prejudiced “business” people: dirty and ill-used.
Sure, they’ll listen to Nickelback and Celine Dion and watch “24” and CBS News with John (JD–remember?) Roberts and flock to see “Avatar”, but try in good faith to buy some of their stuff and suddenly it’s like we’re Khazakstan.
Sure, order our stuff online and drive across the border to pick it up. Terrific idea: how do we get them to accept our hard-earned money and send it there?
Hey David!
Those are some really great questions about how to use our border KinekPoints with a PayPal account. We have actually run into that in our own online shopping experience and have found a simple way around it. What we’ll do is make a new post answering these questions and also add it to our FAQ section over at Kinek.com.
I can quickly answer your VISA question though. If you run into the problem that VISA won’t process your order because your shipping address is different than your billing address, simply give VISA a call and tell them it’s OK. From that point on they won’t block the transactions.
Keep an eye out for our upcoming post on how to add a KinekPoint border location to your PayPal account. We’ll also email you to let you know.
Thanks for the question!
Gareth