June 26, 2011
LATEST UPDATE: 06/26/2011: Canada Post is expected to resume service tomorrow, with deliveries expected as early as Tuesday. The Canadian parliament passed back-to-work legislation to break the impasse between the company and it’s employee union. Given the backlog of accumulated mail, Canada Post expects it will take some time before operations return to normal. Shipwire will continue monitoring the situation closely, and provide updates as they become available. Given these most recent developments, you can expect Canada Post order holds to be released as early as tomorrow morning.
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05/31/11: Merchants shipping orders in, or to, Canada should pay particular attention to this post.
As of June 2, 11:59 PM EST, Canada Post mail service will be interrupted if an agreement cannot be reached between Canada Post Corporate and the postal trade union. Canada Post is providing the most up-to-date information here. Shipwire remains hopeful that the two sides will find a way to avert a strike, and that a negotiated agreement can be worked out in time to avoid a service interruption.
If however, this does not happen, Shipwire will take the following steps to minimize any disruption to your business:
1. Rate Requests: All shipping rate requests (via a Shopping Cart Integration that uses Shipwire rates, Shipwire API, or your Shipwire Interface) will continue to work exactly as they do today. If your shipping preferences are set to ‘let Shipwire pick the best carrier‘, Shipwire will continue to return Canada Post service rates whenever this would be the most cost-effective service for your order. On in the case of International orders destined to Canada, we will continue quoting national carrier services (e.g. USPS) that depend on Canada Post for final delivery. If you have set your Shipping Preferences to pick your own carriers/methods, and are currently using a Canada Post service as one of your preferred options, we will continue quoting rates with that service (e.g. all Canadian ground-level shipments).
2. Order Processing: Orders that are received in Shipwire (via Shopping Cart, API-direct, or manually through the Interface) will continue to be assigned a carrier/method according to your Shipping Preferences. If a service that depends on Canada Post is selected (i.e. Canada Post for within Canada shipping, or USPS/Royal Mail for orders being shipped to Canada), these orders will automatically be placed ‘On Hold’.
You will have the option of manually clearing this hold by confirming you want the shipment to continue being sent via the same carrier (e.g. Canada Post, USPS) or you can select an alternate carrier option (e.g. Purolator, FedEx or UPS). You can also keep the order on hold in your Shipwire account. If you decide to clear a held order, the order will be sent to the warehouse in the next batch of orders submitted. It is important to emphasize that any order sent to the warehouse using a service dependent on Canada Post will be picked and packed, but will not ship until Canada Post service resumes. For this reason, Shipwire recommends either choosing an alternate (non-Canada Post) Shipping Method when you clear the order, or to leave the order ‘On-Hold’ in your account until Canada Post service resumes.
Once Canada Post service is back to normal, Shipwire will automatically clear any strike-related Order Holds you might have on your orders, and processing will resume as it had before the strike.