Forget The Flotsam of Life: Here Is What Is Important To Know

Decline in small businesses in Canada, the USA and UK can be mainly attributed to closed markets.

I'll explain.  In wargaming terrain making their is a legendary name.  A Canadian going by the title The Kamloopian. He pioneered terrain videos. A few years ago he noted how making terrain to order (his business) was being killed by postal charges. Someone ordered an item from the US then on top of materials -it was cheaper for people to send materials they wanted used- there was the postal service charges that had shot up steeply.

We then had postal charges rise steeply in the UK for the piss poor service we have.  Now up to this point US traders were laughing because it was cheap for them -I certainly bought sets of toy figures for my great nephews I could not get in the UK.

Then...Wallop!  US postal charges shot up. Added to that, anything we purchase from Europe but especially the US, is hit with 17% tax -even if not a new item.

Traders in Europe often note "We cannot ship to the UK" -I can't see why not as we haven't left the EU yet but I think some are being plain obstinate or anti-UK.

Ditto the US where you can pay £20 for an item, the postage can cost £30 and before UK customs let you see it -TAXED.  This was not happening prior to Brexit.

It means all the trade the US got from the UK -95% gone. People in the UK get hit with heavy postal charges so cannot sell to the US.  Ditto Europe.

The post offices that are NOT providing great, reliable service and claim they need to increase costs to keep up that service.  These are people who do not realise the more people buy and sell the more business they get. Businesses, postal services and customers all do well.

In response to one trader mentioning posting updates I told him that would be depressing: seeing all the goodies I could not buy.and he replied:

" I feel your pain, Terry. Between postage costs and reliability, I had to remove automatically accepting international orders from my site. I still take them manually, but it is difficult to make it anywhere near affordable for a buyer to get an order shipped over the water."

It is one of THE main reasons online businesses are failing -and they ARE failing. For the UK the problems started as soon as that Brexit vote came in. Within a week all the free trading stopped, prices rose (comic prices "because of Brexit" which was 3 years off back then!) and taxes started increasing.

In these cases, the traders who fail are not necessarily producing bad goods. They are more or less in a lose, lose and lose situation.

Postal services don't care if these traders go out of business (until it affects them) and the tax people could not give a crap -they just want tax for a Government that does not really care about anything but concessions for BIG businesses.

I sell a book from the online store I get hit with US taxes and end up giving the book away.

Now, if I sold hundreds or thousands of books -no problem!