Royal Mail have issued their latest advice for shipments to Canada advising that there will be severe post delays to Canada over the entire Christmas period and potentially delays will continue until March 2019.
The post delays to Canada are due to the extended industrial action which took place this year. The government stepped in with emergency legislation to force postal workers back to work but the backlog of mail is so severe that there is no indication of when parcels in the system will be delivered, let alone new shipments sent to Canada.
If you have parcels destined for Canada the best advice is to avoid the postal network and use a courier. If you must use the postal network then sending your item via a tracked service will get it priority. Royal Mail also advise that some ParcelForce services are also affected.
Late shipments could seriously impact your seller metrics and if consumers claim that parcels haven’t arrived then could cost you the sale price as well if you are forced to refund. If the post delays to Canada mean that you’re not confident of getting parcels to their destination then it may regretfully make sense to block sales to Canada until the postal network is back to normal.
“As a result of industrial action which took place between 22 October and 27 November, Canada Post is advising commercial customers and consumers that items in or entering its network will have long and unpredictable delays before being delivered – this extends to international items. We are accepting items destined for Canada, but please be advised that these will be severely delayed due to the extensive backlogs being seen. This is likely to be the situation for the foreseeable future – meaning the next several weeks, including the peak holiday season and potentially through to March 2019. We are working with Canada Post to identify how we can reduce the recovery of the backlog.
This will affect all Royal Mail International products, however, Tracked items will be treated as a priority by Canada Post and we therefore recommend you use this service to enable speedier delivery.
Parcelforce Worldwide Global Priority and Global Value services will be affected. This does not affect the Parcelforce Global Express product.
Canada Post are aware of the effect on all customers and are continuing to work to reduce the backlogs as soon as possible and restore operations to normal.”
– Royal Mail
