Shipping From USA To Canada With Recipient Prepaying (me)

[robback]

I'm sure someone can help with this one. A great audiokarma member offered to ship me two tweeters. Since it's only fair that I prepay the shipping, I tried USPS, but it won't allow me to use a Paypal account based in Canada even though the account is in U.S. Dollars, and it won't allow to be entered in the State and Zip fields anything but US info.

Neither I or the "shipper" have done this particular thing before. I'll see if he has a paypal account, but he didn't mention it.

To recap:
I am in Canada
He is in USA
I need to prepay the shipping

How do you guys do it that doesn't involve craziness. I really don't want to inconvenience the speaker shipper.

 

[ictwoody]

Can you just PayPal him? Then he can pay at the post office. Seems simple enough to me.

- Woody

 

[Alobar]

I believe all he needs is an email account for you to pay pal him the money.

 

[blhagstrom]

Yes, I thought Paypal can send money to anyone with an email account.

I suppose they "hold" the money until they set up an account, if they don't have one.
Then they need to figure out how to "collect" the actual funds (bank transfer, check).

 

[Alobar]

Doesn't wally world have some sort of system to send money between stores anywhere? I never tried to but seems like I heard it. May be an option if not PayPal

 

[robback]

Just to update, and respond. First, thanks to all who replied. I've tried every major shipping company. Here's what I think is happening. Credit card companies seem to require that the shipper address and the credit card address are identical. If not, the transaction will not go through. Since I am paying for HIM to be the shipper, it doesn't work. I set up a full Fedex account, to see if that would help, since they pre-validate the card before granting the account. So NOW, I get a different error, "service not valid".

Email to fedex resulted in a response to call their help line, which I suppose I'll try. If that fails, I should be able to prepay him by Paypal directly, send him a copy of the completed customs form, and do it that way.

I've spent a good four hours+ of my time filling in online forms, only to get stuck and stopped by error messages at the end. I've typed his address and the package details so many times, I can see them if I shut my eyes.

The ultimate fallback is if I can't get the tweeters from Texas, the buyer of the Advents seems to think there's a pair of Daytons that will fit the bill at $80 each canadian. I wouldn't do that, personally, but hey...what the heck.

I should have DRIVEN down to Texas to get them! Would almost be faster.

 

[ovaeasy]

I think we're not getting all of the particulars here. I have done purchasing now for nigh on 25 years. We buy and sell across the border all the time.

He either sends you a PayPal invoice or you use PayPal to forward him the funds (tweeters + shipping), you pay, he sends, easy peasy!

Good Luck!

 

[Alobar]

Just to understand, this isn't a problem with cross borders but a shipper issue, is that correct? IOW this issue could be happening if your tweeters were in Vancouver and you in Toronto. Think at this point I would just send the money to the Texas person to cover shipping.

 

[canuckaudiog]

There must be some information missing here, because it seems to me the easiest way to do this would be the shipper calculates the cost of shipping, adds that to the total and then you simply send him that amount via PayPal.

 

[blhagstrom]

Just to update, and respond. First, thanks to all who replied. I've tried every major shipping company. Here's what I think is happening. Credit card companies seem to require that the shipper address and the credit card address are identical. If not, the transaction will not go through. Since I am paying for HIM to be the shipper, it doesn't work. I set up a full Fedex account, to see if that would help, since they pre-validate the card before granting the account. So NOW, I get a different error, "service not valid".

Email to fedex resulted in a response to call their help line, which I suppose I'll try. If that fails, I should be able to prepay him by Paypal directly, send him a copy of the completed customs form, and do it that way.

I've spent a good four hours+ of my time filling in online forms, only to get stuck and stopped by error messages at the end. I've typed his address and the package details so many times, I can see them if I shut my eyes.

The ultimate fallback is if I can't get the tweeters from Texas, the buyer of the Advents seems to think there's a pair of Daytons that will fit the bill at $80 each canadian. I wouldn't do that, personally, but hey...what the heck.

I should have DRIVEN down to Texas to get them! Would almost be faster.

WTF does ANY of this have to do with YOU sending HIM $????

YOU send HIM $, HE buys postage and mails.

Period.