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Hi Jed,
I was thinking about this myself as well, seeing how it was my shipment which got misplaced and some more ongoing delays with Canada Post.
Usually, I order parts from Newark Canada, and they can source from UK, USA or Thailand among others. They ship everything through UPS, and it's delivered to my door, signature required. The Polysix I have, and a couple of other keyboards I had from eBay also came in through UPS. There was only one case of a late/difficult delivery two years ago, but other than that, it's stellar: fast, reliable, careful shipping for me so far. The package costs can be calculated here to see if it's advantageous:
https://wwwapps.ups.com/ctc/request?loc=en_CA&WT.svl=PNRO_L1
If it is really advantageous, i.e. cost not much more than item cost, then I'd recommend it.
On the other hand, the reason this misplaced item happened only now is because there is a very, very weird situation with Canada Post right now: they want to stop home delivery... Some speculate is because there's a will to privatize it. Which brings us to even worse than that and could explain the growing number of mis-delivered items (mine, others' letters delivered at my address: it is said that the employees are doing this deliberately to show their discontent.
So the issue might be a very localized one for Canada and/or temporary, or it could even get worse. At least that's how I view it, and I currently cannot trust Canada Post to deliver correctly.
I definitely would pay for the board and UPS shipping if necessary.
An extract of a forum discussing this:
"said by JMarkham :
Looks like Canada Post is taking savings further with the start of pilots studies into delivering mail ever two weeks... wonder what kind of savings that would generate?
»www.thestar.com/news/gta/2014/01···ail.html
The employees are doing this on purpose.
Around the holidays there was a union-agreed leave of absence and this week they're pulling more shenanigans because they didn't want to deliver yesterday and today; if they said 'no' to delivering mail, they'd have to do depot work so instead they pulled some kind of workplace health and safety guideline issue.
I believe so far they've intentionally missed work at least three days so far.
Not sure if this is province wide but they're definitely engaged in all manner of activities here in Niagara and we debated in our office today concerning "how stupid are they" considering that they're striking themselves out of work."
---In PolySix@yahoogroups.com, <jed.jorgensen@...> wrote:Hi Polysix community!
I have a question for the group about international shipping on the KLM-367 PCB clones that I sell. Until last month I had gotten incredibly lucky and never lost a shipment. Now that that streak has broken (I refunded the customer) I’m wondering if anyone has any suggestions about international shipping and insurance.
I’ll try to explain the dilemma and questions:
Shipping in the US is cheap (~$6) and easy and includes up to $50 of insurance with USPS Flat Rate Priority Mail. Additional insurance can be purchased beyond $50. I wish I could replicate this for international shipments.
I have used USPS Priority Flat Rate Envelopes for shipping outside the US because it is easy. It is not cheap however (~$21 to Canada, $25 for everywhere else) and does not include any insurance. Nor can insurance be purchased for that service.
Flat rate is nice because I can charge the same rate for everybody but it is a bummer because the shipping costs as much as the product. I could switch to First Class shipping, which would be a bit cheaper (maybe $5 or $8 less) but more substantially work on my end. It also does not include insurance.
With options that include insurance (Priority Mail Express, essentially) the price jumps up to around $45 – which seems completely unrealistic. I certainly wouldn’t pay $45 in shipping for a product that costs $20.
Does anyone know of any reasonable international shipping solutions that include insurance? I only barely looked at FedEx or UPS because their international prices seemed even worse and vary so greatly by location. If you have better information, please let me know.
Barring that, I can think of a couple of options:
1) Offer the really expensive insurance option. Don’t provide any refunds for international orders without insurance (this is not much of a ‘solution’).
2) Have a European “distributor.” Andy already does this to some extent but if the shipping is better/cheaper once the boards are already over the pond maybe there is a solution here? This doesn’t help folks in other parts of the world (whom comprise a very small percentage of orders, but still).
Sorry for the rambling. If anybody has any ideas I’m all ears.
Happy New Year everyone!
Jed