Last year I briefly wrote about RightStuf’s change in shipping policies to Canada. Prior to that, the popular anime retailer had a threshold of $150 for purchases to achieve ‘free shipping’, where as now Canadian shoppers must buy $250/US worth of items. This increase has obviously meant less purchases for my friends and I with $100 being quite a bit of additional cost, especially when it dramatically increases the amount of money we would likely be charged at the border.

That being said, yesterday we received our first RightStuf shipment since these changes went into place. With a big box of goodies now in my living room for Andre, Marsha and myself, I can happily say that RightStuf’s previous statement that they were “currently looking into alternative Canadian freight options, and we are doing our best to find an economical solution that continues to provide reliable service”, has made a really great update to their Canadian shipping.

RightStuf now sends their shipments to Canada via FedEx, which has resulted in three significant differences: shipment tracking, faster shipping times and upfront brokerage fees. Tracking numbers for your shipments and faster shipping is obviously great, but I was most impressed by the upfront brokerage fees.

To briefly explain, even though we’ve always reached the threshold of ‘free’ shipping, this only covers RightStuf’s expenses to ship. We would still be stuck paying considerable additional costs when our packages arrived because of custom fees. Ouch, right? You don’t even want to know what the total cost of my Fate/Zero box sets ended up coming to.

However now with FedEx, buyers are told upfront when ready to check out just how much FedEx will charge to handle all the usual “taxes, duties, customs and processing fees”. This means that 1) you know immediately how much it will all come to (so you can also decide to go ‘nope!’ if too much), and 2) no waiting for weeks in fear you could be charged as much for delivery as what you paid for the stuff itself, and then dealing with the bill when it arrives!

As sign of how awesomely this new system has worked for us here at Kuriousity, in the past we have always paid an additional $50-$150 for every order we’ve gotten from RightStuf, and this was for orders totaling no more than $300/US. It has typically taken about two weeks for our orders to arrive once notification came that they had left RightStuf’s warehouse. This month we put in an order for $534 worth of goodies, and via FedEx paid an extra $78. Our order arrived within four days and came to the door with a simple signature, smile and not a penny more!

In conclusion to this long-winded ‘news’ post, well-played, RightStuf, well-played. The $250 threshold still makes it a bit more difficult to order as often as we did before but with shipping improvements like this (and, who am I kidding, the ease of reaching the threshold when combining orders with friends’ is obvious), you’ve definitely ensured we’ll keep going back for more and taking advantage of those awesome sales you hold.

(And for those curious about what we bought, keep an eye out for future Swag Bag posts!)