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I really wish Canada and the US would establish better postal ties, with much lower rates to encourage cross-border trade; if any two countries should be very close, it's these two. Instead, the USPS almost doubled rates for many levels of service to Canada about a month ago, in order to get their budget in order since that disastrous bill was passed in 2006 requiring them to pre-fund their workers' retirement plans for 75 years in advance.

However, unless things are very different in Canada, Paypal's fees are nowhere near 7%, so I'm really curious why Walter wants an additional 7% fee from you for this. For the very smallest-volume sellers, Paypal's fee is 2.9%, plus an additional 1% for currency exchange which of course is necessary for any cross-border transactions unless you elect to keep the funds in that foreign currency (which is an option). In fact, calling PP's fees "rapacious" is really quite unwarranted, as they have the absolute lowest fees I've ever seen for a credit card processor. I challenge you to find a CC processor with lower fees; there aren't any. PP is downright cheap for small sellers; they don't charge a monthly fee like most processors. The only place they might not be cheapest is if you're selling in huge volumes, such as more than $100,000 per month. But for small sellers, they can't be beat.

Anyway, the point is, if a seller wants you to pay extra to cover PP's fees, they should only be asking for an additional 2.9% if they're domestic, and 3.9% if they're outside the US. (Of course, I could be mistaken, and Canadian PP users might be getting charged a lot more than us US customers. Considering that cars cost nearly twice as much in Canada as they do in the US, even when they're built in Canada, this wouldn't surprise me too much.)

As for your bad USPS employee, that happens. They're not all highly competent, just like at any business, and worse, they're unionized so it's not that easy to get rid of them. As someone who sends a lot of USPS parcels, my strategy is simple: I go to the same PO most of the time, and I get to know the clerks there, and I know which ones are good and which ones aren't. So if I have a choice between one of my regular highly competent clerks and some stooge who I either know isn't competent, or I haven't dealt with before, I pick the clerk I know. One big issue I have is that many clerks don't know how well how to deal with international parcels, because they don't have to handle them very often since Americans don't generally send much mail internationally. The USPS made a big change to their online customs form over 6 months ago, and I've had many clerks who had never seen it before I came to them.

Dan