After many years of satisfied deliveries to Canada, my last three orders have not made it and all they offer is a store credit. Not satisfactory! What good is a store credit in a store you can’t buy from? Sad to say but I guess I’m done with Mr. Snuff. It appears they plan to keep my money AND get their product back. Not okay in my world…
2024-05-27T05:00:00Z
Do your orders have tracking - where are they ‘lost’? There have been a few posts recently where orders to Canada were caught in customs subject to duties - this possibly escalated recently with people bulk/panic buying Bernards and Rosinski?
If you have messaged support over the weekend, it has been a public holiday weekend here in the UK, so they will likely be catching up on things today at Mr Snuff, but might be worth shooting @Jonny or @Kay a message, their comms have been stellar since taking over.
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Hi @doug
I am sorry to here you have had so much trouble getting your orders successfully delivered. I have now completed an investigation to see if I can identify the problem:
- Your first order SMS79170 cleared customs and is currently marked as ‘Successfully Delivered’ by Canada Post. Since you did not receive this order then I can only guess it was delivered to the wrong address?
- Your second order SMS85160 cleared customs and was marked as ‘Undeliverable’ by Canada Post (after an attempted delivery failed). Again, this may mean there is a problem with your address.
- Because of the problems with the second delivery, @kay reached out to you via email and included a copy of the post label so you could check your address. It would be great if you could confirm your address. Kay also provided you with a full store credit.
- You used your store credit to purchase a replacement order.
- The good news is that your replacement order has cleared customs and is currently marked as ‘In Transit’ and on its way to you
This is what our tracking system and customer service email records show me anyway. If the above is incorrect then please let me know and I will do my best to sort things out for you.
Generally speaking, getting our orders through customs and into Canada can be tricky. In your case though, all your orders succesfully entered the country. The problem appears to be with the last leg of the journey, getting Canada Post to put the parcel in your hands.
Let me know if your replacement order arrives.
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Hi Johnny
First of all, thank you for your response. I did in fact receive the first order SMS 79170 back at the end of January. My second order SMS 585160 was returned but the address was correct I don’t know why that happened. I then got my wife to place an order under her name and our address in Saskatchewan which was also rejected and sent back. Because all you gave me was a store credit I made a 4th order SMS 86485 and looking at the tracking on that yesterday, I’m pretty sure was returned also, you may not have received it yet though.
It’s the same address I’ve been using for years so I’m not sure what the problem is.
Thank you, Clem.
I’ve been in touch with Johnny and hopefully we can get this sorted out.
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I had frustrations with the services but I’ve nothing but praise for the new administration’s efforts; here’s hoping you get your orders soon enough!
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Hi Johnny.
You were right, my order did make it and so did my wife Kathy’s. I misunderstood the wording from the tracking when it said Customs returned the order. I thought that meant they returned it to you, but they just returned it to the mail. Sadly I was charged duty for the first time ever (I know you have no control of that) the strange thing is my 34 piece order was charged $23 and her 10 piece order was charged $39 (more than the order was worth) Go figure…
P.S. I also got a letter from customs stating that they had returned my previous order due to the nicotine pouches that I ordered with my snuff. FYI they’re not permitted in Canada. Thanks again for your response, I look forward to doing business again soon.
Doug
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Hi @Doug
That is great news that it arrived safely at last - we got there in the end 
It is interesting to note that the customs must have held your parcel to open in and calculate the duty and I suppose that explains the delay.
One thing we are planning on doing here is double checking the Canadian customs duty calculations. We suspect they are charging too much and that may explain why so many of our Canadian parcels get returned, because the recipient refuses to pay.
As it stands many parcels get through without any duty being added. This is on Canadian customs but it is, in effect, just good old fashioned smuggling. This bothers me because I want to run a completely clean company.
One thing we are considering is finding a way to gather the duty ourselves, or providing information on the labels that tells customs how to calculate the duty correctly. This will mean that every Canadian customer will then pay duty, but the duty will be correct. That will affect sales I am sure, but it removes the chaotic smuggling element, with all the overhead that causes.
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Never posted here before, but I feel I should add my 2 cents regarding Canadian customs fees.
I’ve ordered a lot of snus from Sweden in the past, and the biggest aid in receiving consistent and correct customs charges seems to be having accurate net weights listed on the shipping labels. If they aren’t clearly listed, it appears some customs agents resort to using either the gross weight of the package, or charging each individual tin as 50 grams, both resulting in ridiculous fees (there is some ambiguous wording in tobacco import regulations which refers to “50 grams or fractions of 50 grams” for smokeless tobacco).
Additionally, fees do vary depending on which province the package is headed for, so weights could be especially helpful for Canadian deliveries.
I realize this would end any hope of having packages slip through un-charged, but since you’re aiming for the honest approach, this may be helpful.
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Thanks for the info @CaptainLakrits, that was really useful and has spurred us on to take a look at the labels we use for Canadian deliveries.
Currently we do not put the total weight of the tobacco alone, which is, as you say, probably the reason for Canadian customs to casually use the total parcel weight as the tobacco weight, rounded up to the nearest 50g.
To calculate the total tobacco weight for a given parcel we will need to store the tobacco weight for every individual product and store that in our warehouse software.
The hard bit will be automatically summing up the weights so it can be printed on the label. Tricky, but perhaps possible.
Finally, we have to be very careful that we only use these labels for Canadian orders, because whilst Canada appears to apply duty to snuff, many countries do not, and so we don’t want to give the impression this is generic loose tobacco.
Anyway, its a problem worth solving so thanks again for helping us think it through.