Brief: A decade of cross-border shipping to Canada

For more than 10 years, GlobalPost and ePost Global have worked side by side to move small businesses’ parcels around the world. GlobalPost, ShipStation’s in-house international carrier, serves as the merchant-facing partner for SMBs and marketplace sellers that don’t have the resources to manage cross-border logistics themselves. Behind it, ePost Global runs the worldwide distribution network that gets those parcels where they need to go.

Canada matters more to this partnership than almost any other market. It’s a top-two destination for both companies and accounts for about 27% of overall volume. When something happens in Canada, like the Canada Post strike, it disrupts everybody.

Problem: The Canada Post strike hits peak season

In November 2024, at the height of peak season, the Canada Post strike started, and the union walked off the job. Few people expected a strike during the busiest shipping window of the year, but it happened.

The stakes for merchants were immediate. Q4 holiday sales are what keep many small businesses alive through the year. A shipping freeze into Canada would mean missed holiday orders, lost customers, and damaged trust. For marketplace sellers, late deliveries would also hurt account health and search rankings on platforms like Amazon, penalties they could do nothing to prevent.

The workers returned to their jobs, but the contract dispute never fully resolved. In September 2025, Canada Post went on strike a second time.

Solution: A Canada Post strike contingency plan built in advance

The two teams had seen this coming. “In the weeks before the strike, we didn’t wait to react. We prepared,” says Crystal Johnson, Senior Manager of Logistics at GlobalPost.

While the outcome of the labor talks was still uncertain, GlobalPost and ePost Global monitored negotiations in real time, mapped alternative carriers, and modeled the operational impact. Together, they built dynamic routing logic using product codes, service levels, and Canada-specific shipment data.

When the strike was announced, ePost Global turned the plan on. “We had a contingency plan outlined and in place, and we needed to turn that on,” says Helaine Rich, VP of Strategic Sales and Administration at ePost Global.

With shipper approval, the teams rerouted Canada-bound volume, blocked Canada Post from the routing, and spread parcels across ePost Global’s multi-carrier final-mile network. Within 24 hours, parcels that had been waiting for a solution were moving again, whether they entered Canada through USPS or crossed the border directly.

Merchants never saw the change. They kept the same labels and the same workflow, with no retraining, no integration updates, and no services to reselect. “For the merchant experience on our side, there was zero workflow friction,” Johnson says.

Tracking stayed intact, too. ePost Global tied every tracking event to each parcel’s original tracking number, so sellers and their customers had full visibility from start to finish. “It was complete transparency for the customers, with no lift on their end,” Rich says.

That simplicity took work to deliver. “It was a simple experience for those shipping,” Rich says. “But it took a lot of coordination and development on our side.”

Outcome: 169,000+ parcels delivered through two Canada postal strikes

More than 95% of Canada-bound parcels moved and were delivered during the 2024 holiday peak, with transit times holding at pre-strike levels. Merchants kept fulfilling orders without pauses, and none had to send apologetic cancellation notices to their customers.

“This was not a pilot program or a test run,” Johnson says. “We deployed a high-volume live network to protect our shippers to Canada.”

When the second strike hit in September 2025, the teams didn’t start over. “We didn’t have to rebuild the framework from scratch. We just reapplied it,” Johnson says. More than 85% of GlobalPost’s DDP parcel volume into Canada ran through the same contingency routing structure during the 2025 disruption.

Across both strikes, the partnership processed and routed more than 169,000 GlobalPost shipments to Canada, each one a holiday order that reached its customer.

Running the same playbook successfully twice reflects how the partnership operates every day: biweekly executive calls, near-daily phone conversations, and a shared habit of planning for disruptions before they arrive. It's an approach designed to contain disruptions before they escalate into the operational and customer consequences described in the Shadow Loss Chain.