How to save on shipping costs to Canada from the US by using a Kinek point.

Online shopping has become so much more popular. Gone are the days when everybody drove to the local store or even the mall to buy everything. Nowadays, we enjoy the freedom and convenience of sitting in front of our computer screen at home and surfing at our leisure to find the bargains. When we do, we also love the thought that that item will be shipped directly to our door – no hassle, no gas spent.

The only issue I have encountered in my years of online shopping is that because I live in Canada there are numerous items I find online on US sites and they offer free shipping, but only to a US address. There is a fee to ship it to my home in Ontario. The savings I make by buying the bargain on their site is then offset by the shipping costs. Alternatively, you may live in an apartment that cannot receive parcels or work so much that you are never home to receive your delivery. So what to do?

The solution for me is simple and could possibly be for you also if you live within a reasonable distance to the US border. I am about an hour from the border into New York State. You need to get hooked up with a Kinek point. Kinek has a network of over 1,000 locations in the US that will receive your parcel for you. They will then store it for you until you can visit and pick it up.

The process is simple. For me, I went onto the Kinek site at www.kinek.com and found the Kinek location closest to the US/Canada border in Buffalo, NY. I signed up for an account.

To sign up, you just need to enter a valid email address and create a password. As usual, you will need to confirm both the email address and password.

Next you will need to enter your home address. Of course the parcels are not going to be sent to the home address, but they need it to confirm ID for you when you go to pick up your parcel.

Once they have you information, you are then prompted to choose a Kinek location to attach to your account. They have locations specifically for US borders but also hundreds of other locations throughout the US. Once you have chosen your location, you will be given a unique number that identifies you at that Kinek point.

That’s it. Now all you do is whenever you order something online you use the Kinek point address as the “ship to” address. You MUST include your unique Kinek number so they know who the package is for as they do not want parcels delivered with just a name on as they would need to hunt through their records each time to marry it up with the right account.

So what’s in it for Kinek? Well, of course there is a cost for this service. Depending on the weight of your package there is a “storage fee”. If the parcel is under 10lbs it costs $5 to store it for up to 30 days. The costs go up from there. For example, a package weighing between 51 and 60lbs costs $20.

Recently, my wife bought some boots from amazon.com because they weren’t available at amazon.ca (she likes boots!). They wanted $35 to ship them to Canada. Instead we paid the $5 and had them shipped to our Kinek point in Buffalo. We usually cross the border once a month anyway as it’s so close, and so we saved ourselves $30! Not much maybe but, hey, it all adds up and every penny we can save in the current economy is good, right?