Good morning.
My name is Maureen Lyons. I have been a toy seller on eBay in Winnipeg since 2012, with a store called McQueen and Mo Mater.
While currently I have 1,000 items available for sale, I consider myself to be a small-time seller on the small and medium-sized business spectrum. However, the income is necessary nonetheless. I'm a mother of four and my partner is self-employed, so every penny counts in our household. I would assume that this is the case for many small sellers on eBay. Regardless of our ages or circumstances, we are supplementing our modest incomes with eBay sales.
To date, my store has shipped about 1,500 orders through Canada Post. Postage is my largest single expense. By the end of this calendar year, I expect that amount to exceed about $20,000. Approximately 90% of postage for my customers is purchased through eBay's arrangement with PayPal shipping to gain a modest discount through their volume customer contract, while the remainder is spent on domestic Lettermail directly at my nearest authorized postal agent.
As I read through the discussion paper, “Canada Post in the Digital Age”, I noted with interest many of the issues that it detailed. I thank you for preparing that report and for allowing me to be here today to speak about my dependence on the healthy operation of our national postal system. Without Canada Post, I lose the ability to conduct business as an online seller.
Believe me, over this past summer, I tried to shake my dependence on Canada Post. Unlike many of my counterparts on eBay, I made a conscious decision not to close my store during the long period that there was uncertainty about the labour situation. I developed a contingency plan and I put it into operation. It was to offer local pickup for regional sales, courier service for domestic orders, and day trips south to utilize the USPS for international sales. Considering that a round trip to the United States to mail a parcel is, for me, a 232-kilometre journey, you must understand that this was a decision I did not lightly make.
Even so, half of my customers are Canadians, and they avoided, as did I, all shopping online during the summer. This has extended into fall. Normally by mid-October to late October my sales are brisk, and with the holiday season approaching, my business is still floundering.
Canadian small businesses need CPC and CUPW to develop a long-term arrangement that will provide consistent, reliable service to all Canadians. The disruption that labour strife caused extended beyond the strife itself. The other half of my customers are international, and nearly equally split between the U.S.A. and overseas. Those customers, for the most part, remained blissfully unaware of our labour strife, which brings me to a sore point: the cost of service by Tracked Packet.
No one believes it costs three times as much to mail something via Tracked Packet as it does by small packet air mail when both deliver at the same speed, generate the same bar codes, and are scanned and entered into CPC's system at the counter. If the issue is one of liability, please instead reduce or eliminate the amount of included insurance with Tracked Packet and leave it up to the individual sellers to purchase at additional cost. Having insurance included is not value added for most sellers, since it's not usually the tracked items that get lost en route to their destinations. We need delivery confirmation more than we need insurance, and we need it to be affordable.
When I asked other eBay sellers what question they wanted me to offer you today, they raised a hue and cry of more affordable tracking and more tracked options. It's difficult, if not impossible, for Canadian eBay sellers to be competitive against our American counterparts. The price of postage puts us at a steep disadvantage. That goes across the board, but is most glaring with the absence of a traced Lettermail category between regular domestic Lettermail and a full-fledged parcel.
We're asking for delivery confirmation for an extra dollar or two, if possible, on oversized Lettermail that still ships in an envelope under two centimetres thick. We can all see that parcels are the way of the future, e-commerce is the way of the future, tracked solutions are the way of the future. Buyers expect tracking, sellers expect tracking, and sales platforms require it for logistical metrics.
I can say with all confidence that all eBay sellers with whom I have discussed the issues facing Canada Post think the same thing: let us grow together and not apart.
