Canada Post Struggles with Backlog – Over 6 Million Packages Still Undelivered

While the Canadian government put a temporary halt to the worker’s strike at Canada Post a few weeks ago, the postal service is struggling to just catch up with the backlog.

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READ MORE: Canada Post Workers Ordered Back to Work Today

As of yesterday, CBC News reported that Canada Post has over 6 million undelivered packages and the service is warning Canadians that it may not deliver all packages before Christmas.

And despite adding over 4,000 temporary staff and 2,000 extra vehicles, some remote Canadian locations may even have to wait until 2019 to receive parcels already in the system.

Many Canadian online merchants switched to alternative shipping methods when the rotating strike started.

READ MORE: Canada Post Strike May Hurt Canadian Workers as Businesses Shift Services

Impact on Global Merchants

But for many U.S. and other international merchants who typically ship orders with the postal service, the situation is far more difficult to fix.

Many Canadian customers insist on postal shipments because couriers such as UPS, FedEx, and DHL add much higher brokerage fees to shipments.

This can make many items significantly more expensive for Canadians. And it may cause some Canadian customers to refuse packages which couriers return to the sender with return shipping fees.

Without this backlog cleared by Canada Post, non-Canadian shippers still need to warn their Canadian customers that orders may not arrive in time or inform them they will need to pay higher shipping and brokerage fees from courier services if they really want the order before Christmas.

Unfortunately, it seems until Canada Post resolves this situation, there is no good solution for merchants shipping to Canada.

Have you had issues with shipments going to Canada using the postal service? Please use the comments section below or head over to our Facebook Group for Small Business Sellers and interact with other small business owners.

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