Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Holiday shopping made easy online! Places with affordable shipping in Canada!

Happy shopping season everyone!
I happen to have a lot of gifts to send and do not like trekking to the post office, have to package and wrap the gifts carefully and then pay for postage.
Just seems like too much....work!
 In this modern time it seems much easier to buy gifts online.
The only issue is if you are not careful you can spend tons on shipping. Just thought I would post some of my favorite websites to buy gifts in Canada.
Most of these websites have free or very well priced shipping.

1) Well.ca free shipping for any item in Canada. There is a charge to send items to the US, so for  US based gifts something else is faster and better.
But for sending a gift in Canada, this is great! Well.ca also sells a lot of nice handmade soaps,candy,food!
Prices are usually better than a retail store for the most part.

2) Chocodirect.com
This is one of my favorite places to buy candy and gifts. Shipping is $5 for any order and I just noticed this week they made some gift baskets for the holidays!
The website is based in Quebec and usually an order takes at most 5 days to be received.
Chocodirect only ships in Canada, so not really good for US gifts.
The price of their baskets is quite good and compared to most of those "basket shops" shipping is very resonable. They do not seem to be charging a crazy ammount just to have items in a basket.
I calculated the cost of their $20 basket and the value of the items is $19 if you buy them without a basket!
Speaking to my mother who happens to order gift baskets for the holidays, she told me that she pays around $15-20 to send gift baskets from a local store (she is in Montreal).
I have been shopping at Chocodirect for a few years now and have not had any issues with shipping. One good thing they do for the environment is they seem to reuse or "repurpose" their mailing boxes. My last order, the outside packaging was a box used to hold a large  quantity of chocolate bars (it was a giant Valor chocolate box). The packaging inside to protect my items was mostly paper and my glass items had bubble wrap!

Hopefully this helps your online shopping. I will try and find more sites and add links later today!