How To Avoid Paying UPS Brokerage Fees in Canada – Self Clearance Instructions

While we’d all love to buy everything domestically in Canada, sometimes you don’t have a choice. There’s always excitement when purchasing goods online but then the dread sets in of whether you’ll be dinged duties. Worse yet, if you’ve ever dealt with international shipments with UPS, you know about their ridiculous customs fees.

The good news is that there’s a way to avoid paying UPS brokerage fees in Canada. In this article we’re going to give a full rundown of what the fees actually are and a process called self clearance to get yourself out of paying those import fees.

Stop paying UPS Brokerage Fees

We’ve gone through this in detail with DHL where they call it customs fees where we explained how to self-clear your own packages but having recently been slapped with a massive bill from UPS, we thought it’d be a great idea to answer those UPS-specific questions you might have.

The truth is, UPS is the worst when it comes to customs fees – not because the taxes and duty are different but because they charge something called “Brokerage Fee”.

So whether you’ve ordered that awesome gift for a travel lover, or an epic-sized world map with pins, or literally anything else you’re buying online that comes from outside of Canada, we’re going to explain what the heck is going on, how to give you step-by-step instructions for how to avoid it, and cover a few scenarios that you might be encountering.

Why are there import fees?

When you buy something internationally from say the United States, United Kingdom, or Hong Kong or a friend or family member ships you something, they have to declare what the item is and its value.

Like how we pay taxes on practically everything here in Canada, there are taxes on goods that you’re importing through a courier like UPS. For shipments, there’s more to it and it all sums up into what’s called “Import Fees”.

Here’s a breakdown of the common line items included in import fees and what they mean.

HST or GST + PST

This will depend on what province you’re in but it’s the baseline tax on goods that you’re used to paying at home.

Can you avoid this: If you’ve been charge this, no.

Duty

Duty is a new variable that you’re probably not…