Shopping for an e-bargain

Many prognosticators have forecasted an outflux of Canadian consumer spending to the United States as we move towards the holiday buying season. Two factors are precipitating these projections. First, the Canadian dollar has enjoyed breakneck appreciation against the greenback, moving past parity to levels not observed in close to half-a-century. Second, there is a widespread perception, which in most cases is factual, that US consumer goods prices are substantially lower than their Canadian counterparts.

So, I decided to do a cost comparison, assembling an identical basket of goods on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca, with a shipping quote for a Canadian home address, to determine whether it really would make fiscal sense for me to take my shopping down south. In the baskets were the following items:

Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach (hardcover) - Shortlisted for the 2007 Booker Prize
Cormac McCarthy's The Road (paperback) - Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Price for Fiction
Stephen Colbert's I Am America (hardcover) - No awards received or pending, but given the strength of the Colbert Nation, an apt choice.

Here’s the breakout:

Initially, it looks like I’m going to realize a savings of over $6 CAN (e.g. close to 15%) before taxes by going the .com route. But once the nasty shipping monster gets factored it, we see that it’s actually far more effective, both in terms of cost and turn-around time, for me to keep my money in Canada.

True, this is anecdotal, and far from being an exhaustive survey of cross-border pricing. But my gut tells me that until free US-to-Canada shipping becomes adopted by the big e-tailers, Canadians hoping for a huge savings on the .com side might be more than a little bit disappointed.

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