Canadian retailers sell to Americans and American retailers sell to Canadians, and both directions produce the same complaint: the price at checkout is not the price the customer expected.
Almost every cross border abandonment traces back to a surprise, and surprises are a design problem before they are a logistics one.
Show the currency, always
A price reading 49.00 with no currency is ambiguous to everyone. A Canadian assumes Canadian dollars, an American assumes US dollars, and one of them is about to be unpleasantly corrected.
Write CAD 49 or USD 49 explicitly, everywhere, including in the cart and the confirmation email. If you offer both currencies, let the customer choose and remember the choice. Detecting location and switching silently is worse, because someone browsing on a VPN or travelling gets prices they did not ask for and cannot change.
Duties and taxes are where trust is won or lost
This is the big one. A Canadian ordering from a US store can face duties, GST or HST, and a customs brokerage fee collected by the courier at the door. That last one is the killer, because it arrives days later, is unexpected, and is frequently more than the shipping cost.
You have two honest options.
Delivered duty paid. Calculate and collect everything at checkout. The total is higher, and it is final. This converts better than people expect, because certainty beats a lower number that might grow.
Delivered duty unpaid, clearly stated. The customer pays on delivery. Cheaper at checkout, and you must say so plainly on the product page and again at checkout, not in a shipping policy nobody opens.
What loses customers permanently is the third option: saying nothing and letting the courier deliver the news.
The de minimis thresholds are worth knowing
Low value shipments can enter with reduced or no duty, and the thresholds differ by direction and by whether goods qualify under the trade agreement. The rules also move: the treatment of low value parcels into the United States changed materially in 2025, and anything you read from before then may be out of date.
The practical advice is to check the current position with your carrier rather than relying on a blog post, including this one, and to build your checkout so the calculation is a setting rather than a hard coded assumption.
Shipping estimates that survive contact with reality
Cross border parcels clear customs, and customs takes an unpredictable amount of time. A store promising three to five days for a shipment crossing the border is writing a complaint ticket in advance.
Give a range that includes clearance, say plainly that customs can add time, and let people pay for expedited if speed matters. Under promising here costs you almost nothing and prevents the emails.
Returns, which are the expensive part
A cross border return costs real money and the duty is usually not recoverable without paperwork nobody fills in. This is worth deciding deliberately rather than discovering.
Options that work: a returns address in the customer's own country, refund without return for low value items, or an honest policy stating the customer covers return shipping. All three are fine. What is not fine is a returns page written for domestic orders that quietly does not describe what actually happens.
The details that make a store feel local
- Postal codes and ZIP codes validate differently. A form that rejects K1A 0B1 is telling Canadian customers something.
- Provinces and states both need to be in the dropdown, correctly labelled.
- Phone formats differ in presentation even though the numbering is shared.
- Spelling. A Canadian store writing "color" reads slightly imported, in the same way an American store writing "colour" does.
None of these individually decides a sale. Together they are the difference between a store that feels like it serves you and one that tolerates you.
See how we work with Canadian businesses, or read about how we build stores. If you are already selling across the border and the abandonment rate is bothering you, send us the checkout.
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