My online sales career is long and illustrious. I’ve been at it since 2001 and have sold everything from art, jewelry, perfumes, household knick knacks, to – currently – skincare, both direct and via marketplaces (Ebay and others). It is at once a hobby, an addiction, and, in the early days, a safety net. And I’m always and forever trying to find ways to reduce the shipping costs. Even in pre-COVID times, shipping rates were getting out of hand and kept going up every quarter. Got to a point where to ship a 200g/0.5lb package to BC would cost about $25.

Yes, it’s true, even with Canada Post there are ways to save, like sending without tracking for smaller packages, but that wouldn’t work for fragile boxed items. Even for small flat bubble mailers it’s not worth the headache when a package gets lost. So many emails, “please wait another week”, “okay we’ll ship out a replacement”, “oh, the first one’s arrived 8 weeks late, great! what do we do about the replacement” and so on. Plus, Paypal and Stripe really like seeing shipment confirmation in case of a dispute. It’s rare, but can get unpleasant and it’s best to be armed with a tracking number.

Happily, last year I found FreightCom. I recommend it if you need a faster service with better rates. Their UPS rates for parcels going to the US save me at least $5-7 per pkg vs Canada Post, but the main advantage is the speed of delivery. To be fair, even in 2020 and now Canada Post has been great at getting packages to the border, but then USPS takes over and it can take a very long time. So that’s where UPS or Fedex come in, and FreightCom is a good option, highly recommend depending on your priorities.

However, if you don’t care much about timing and just want to save, save, save, go with my latest find – ChitChats! They pool the packages and then hand them off to either Canada Post or USPS in most cases. Still the same network, but for some reason, way better rates.

I’m somewhat reluctant to share this secret out of fear that I’ll ruin a very good thing. And then I think, the more customers they have, the better the rates they can offer. Probably. Hopefully. So here you you go. ChitChats.

I just created a shipment for a 100g package going from Toronto to North Carolina and it cost five dollars sixty nine cents. Canadian. Includes tracking and insurance. I kid you not. Canada Post would charge at least $12 for a tracked packet service. But typically you can expect something like $8-10 with ChitChats. Still very decent, almost like in the “old times”, in the “old normal” etc etc.

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I recently started shopping at AliExpress. It’s a retail arm of the wholesale Alibaba website. They both let you shop directly from the manufacturers in Asia (primarily China), the difference is in the minimum quantities. The main draw, obviously, is low prices. Plus, at AliExpress most items are offered with free shipping.

The upside.

• Really really low prices
• Huge selection
• Shipping to over 200 countries
• Buyer protection guarantee

The downside.

• Long delivery times
• All shipments require signature, can be annoying if you shop a lot
• Sub-par item quality, descriptions are often misleading
• Time suck – much like with Amazon, large product selection is great, but it takes a lot of time to find what to Finally Buy! I suppose it’s still less time than going out to the mall to shop, but to me the mental strain is just huge.

I have so far received 4 items from four different sellers. I threw away 2 of these as they were unusable: one was advertised as leather but turned out to be polyurethane, the other was just ugly and smelled like burnt rubber tires. Of the remaining two items, one is “sort of OK” and one is great (love my tiny neodymium magnets). So the ratio so far is 50/50, or 25/75 if you’re really picky. Their buyer protection guarantee sounds good, but I haven’t taken advantage of it since the two items I discarded cost about $10 together. It wouldn’t be worth the time to fill out the complaint form, take pictures etc. Since I can’t whole-heartedly recommend the website, I’m not linking to it. Clean conscience and all. Here’s an example of an item that didn’t live up to my expectations. These sell at a local store for around $8-10. They are exactly as pictured: nice and plump, with no mold lines, and without any funky smell. This is also the photo that was used on the listing I fell for.

This is what I actually received from one AliExpress seller for about $2 including shipping – thin, badly made from a knocked off mold. In addition, visualize the most foul rubber smell that stays on your hands for the entire day, you can’t rinse it off. And, I got 2 white, 2 black, and 2 red ones although the listing pictured white, brown and green, which is what I wanted for my office.

How dare I expect more for two dollars? Well, the logic was that the “$8 one was made in China anyway. This is probably the same.” It wasn’t.

Business idea!

Click the images below to enlarge I came across a retail site with the office located in Canada. They sell these symbolic bracelet sets. Guess where I saw these first! Yep, at AliExpress. That’s a great markup. But I’m not tempted to open up a store of my own, that’s why I so willingly share with you my source I’ve been down that road before, 12 years ago. It was waaaay harder to find low cost items, but on the other hand it was easier to sell. Sometimes I can’t believe the stuff we were able to “move”. There wasn’t such a glut of items out there, not as much selection, not as much fatigue, and buyers weren’t as savvy.

Anyway, that’s the story. Caveat emptor.

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The foot pad on my Macbook Pro Retina fell off the other day. The Apple Store didn’t have a replacement part but an eBay seller in Shenzhen, China did. For $3 with free shipping. The cheapest international shipping option with Canada Post is $5.35 for up to 100g (without tracking). How can a store in China sell me anything for $3, including shipping?

https://www.cameronhuff.com/blog/free-shipping-from-china/index.html

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But I was unpleasantly surprised by Stripe’s order reversal / refund / chargeback policy. Call it whatever you want, but if the customer returns the item and you issue a refund, Stripe does not refund the original processing fee. That can be a large chunk of change depending on what you sell.

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If you’re considering doing your work for free, this infographic might help you decide whether you should.

Click to enlarge. Start in the middle.

© Jessica Hische

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How many Internet webpages or websites does your corporation earn income from?

Wasn’t very clear to me.

I list hosting and domain registration as separate expenses every year, but I have no direct revenue from the sale of “widgets” on the website (this blog excluded). I called Revenue Canada to clarify what they meant: do they want to see the websites I operate or just the ones I use to directly sell stuff? The answer was “List 0 (zero) website if you don’t sell anything off of them”.

Frankly, Revenue Canada is pretty nosy so I couldn’t believe it. I’ve sometimes called twice, three times with the same question, and each agent would have a different answer for me. The more elaborate answer was found at the Revenue Canada website. This is from their corporate return form but I assume it’s the same for partnerships/sole proprietorships:

You may earn income from your webpages or websites if:

• you sell goods and/or services on your own pages or websites. You may have a shopping cart and process payment transactions yourself or through a third-party service;
• your site doesn’t support transactions but your customers call, complete, and submit a form, or email you to make a purchase, order, booking, and others;
• you sell goods and/or services on auction, marketplace, or similar websites operated by others; or
• you earn income from advertising, income programs, or traffic your site generates. For example:
  • static advertisements you place on your site for other businesses
  • affiliate programs
  • advertising programs such as Google AdSense or Microsoft adCentre
  • other types of traffic programs.

• Also file this schedule if you don’t have a website but you have created a profile or other page describing your business on blogs, auction, market place, or any other portal or directory websites from which you earn income.

Verdict: If you have an online profile for your business with a way to contact you, then yes, you must list the website(s).

Then there’s the next question:

What is the percentage of the corporation’s gross revenue generated from the Internet in comparison to the corporation’s total gross revenue?

This one you have to evaluate for yourself. Do you get most of your business via the website, referrals or some other way?

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