Board logo

subject: Shipping To Toronto: What Will It Cost? [print this page]


If you're shipping to Toronto from St. Paul, it may cost you more to do so than to ship to a location in the United States which is the same distance away. This is because of the fees that your St. Paul courier service is going to have to charge you for shipping internationally. When shipping across an international border there are taxation, customs, and fee considerations which don't apply when you're just shipping to another state or province in the same country.

The first thing that you're going to have to deal with whenever you're shipping to Toronto is paying the Canadian tax on the items that you're shipping. In the past, this used to be broken down into a federal tax, and a provincial tax. The provincial tax did not apply to certain items. If you've shipped to Toronto in the past you might have become used to this model, so it's important you realize that the taxation system there has changed.

Recently certain Canadian provinces, of which Ontario is one, passed a law which combined their provincial tax with the federal tax to create a single tax. This is called the harmonized sales tax, or HST. This is going to apply to most of the things that you might be interested in shipping into Toronto. The HST is currently at 13% in Ontario.

On top of the tax, you are going to have to pay a customs broker to get your goods into the country. When you use a customs broker you pay once for every shipment that you send to the country. This means that there is a way to save some money if you're shipping to Canada on a regular or even semi regular basis. Combine your orders into one order, and then store goods in Canada with a distribution or warehousing service if need be. That way, you only pay that brokerage fee the one time.

Those are the two basic fees that you'll have to pay on essentially every order that you send to Canada. There are some other fees which may arise, but these are mostly specific to certain types of goods, such as a fee you may need to pay in order to get an applicable trade certificate. Use your courier company as a resource to plan out how much your international shipment will cost, as they will be able to bring you up to speed on all applicable fees.

by: Benjamin Curtis




welcome to Insurances.net (https://www.insurances.net) Powered by Discuz! 5.5.0   (php7, mysql8 recode on 2018)