It's hard to find places that ship to Canada. I'd like to support this site, but last time I checked, they won't ship outside of the US.
******** Arizona (
www.***************) will ship USPS. Then you only have to pay the $5 "handling fee" charged by canada customs. It's nice to pay the government $5 for the privilege of being charged 78 cents in duties and taxes
. We need a Canadian on-line auto parts source. I've seen this site:
http://www.altrom.com/cadDefault.aspx but never ordered from them. I've only used it to look up pricing. If you use it, let me know if it works for you.
Items shipped by UPS air have no brokerage fee. So, even if it's $20 more to go by air, it's actually cheaper overall. That's the easiest... Also, if the shipper declares the item to be a low value (something like less than C$25, don't know the exact number) then there's no duties and no brokerage fee. Also, I'm not advocating anything illegal / unethical, but one time I got a package that had no $ owing, and it was because the shipper marked it as repaired items being returned to the original owner. I didn't ask them to do this; they just did it on their own for some reason...
You should also know about the secret tip of clearing it through customs yourself. To do this, you need to get the tracking # the moment the item ships out. Then, call the shipper and tell them that you want to clear it yourself. When the item arrives, you'll have to go to the shipping company warehouse and pick up some paperwork, then go to Canada Customs (located a block or two north of the Toyota/Lexus dealership that's on 32nd ave NE). You have to find the customs code for the item and fill out a form on their ancient computers, and then you can pay the taxes/duties and they stamp the shipping paperwork. After that, you go back to the shippers warehouse and they hand you the item. I've done this twice before (I think it was with DHL and FedEx, not sure about UPS) but it was a few years ago so rules may have changed. It takes about an hour. If the item is imported into Canada somewhere else (e.g. in another province or something), this may not work or may be more of a hassle (faxing paperwork, etc).
You have to go to the customs place well before they close. I went there once and it was 20 minutes to closing time, but the lady told me the process would take 25 minutes, so I'd have to come back another day!
