I wanted to pass this on in case other people were like me and didn’t know this little tidbit before now. Oh. I was the only one who didn’t know? Oh well. At least I can find it again easier in the future.
This was a year full of receiving packages in the mail because I shopped online as much as humanly possible this Christmas. And for some people, I had to ship their packages out. I’m weird and like to track my packages whenever I can, but this year after our UPS fiasco, I tracked everything I sent. For stuff going through Canada, Canada Post’s tracking is pretty good. You can even do it with an app if you want to. It doesn’t tell you about every leg of your package’s journey, but it’s a lot more informative than what happens if you ship a package via Canada Post and it crosses the border. At first, it’s great, but as soon as the package crosses the border, you get less and less information. It even says they have to rely on being given information by the USPS so they don’t know anything anymore.
I tried to ask the Canada Post’s virtual assistant chat bot thing if there was a more efficient way to track packages once they left Canada, and I got a whole bunch of useless responses. None of them included that I could just hop on over to this USPS tracking site. Part of that was my fault. I stupidly thought that once parcels left Canada and went to their destination country, they would get a new tracking number, so my old Canada Post tracking number would be dirt useless. But I was wrong! They keep the same tracking number and it works just fine in the USPS tracking system.
Once I got that tracking set up to send me notifications, I got much more frequent updates, which made me feel a lot better. It turns out Canada Post’s delivery date of December 23 was off by about a month, so I’m glad I decided to track it by USPS. Funnily enough, Canada Post did start giving me updates when it got really close to its destination, but if I had been waiting for those and didn’t have other updates, I would have been losing my mind.
So if you’re like me and occasionally send packages across the border, and you’re also like me and like to track them, don’t just rely on your country’s postal tracking. Figure out if the destination will track as well, especially now with everything being turned on its head.