Sephora Canada News Changes to Online Store, Shipping & Returns

Sunday, June 28, 2015

Sephora has making some huge changes to how they run their Canadian online store and didn't tell anyone. If you Sephora-obsessed like me you may have noticed something odd happening with your virtual wishlist or "beauty bag" on Sephora online, many of the items are now appearing as "Sold out" and "This item cannot be shipped to Canada" (as you can see by part of my wishlist above). I did some digging and found why this is happening...

Sephora has moved their warehouse (the one where all their Canadian orders are shipped from) to Canada, apparently in Ontario. Previously all your Sephora orders were shipped from the US via Borderfree, and you were charged a small "duty" charge for that. 

Now with this comes some not-so-nice changes as well, many of the brands sold on Sephora online will no longer be able to ship to Canada. Which is very odd since many are widely currently available in Canadian Sephora stores across Canada, this includes Laura Mercier, Bobbi Brown, Kate Somerville, Origins, Dior, Giorgio Armani, Hourglass, Sunday Riley, Givenchy, Bare Minerals, Yves Saint Laurent, Murad, Clinique (some products containing SPF) and the list goes on and on. This is fine if you have stores near you (I have many in Toronto) but not fine since some items/brands were exclusively online (some brands were also only carried at select Sephora stores such as Giorgio Armani), and if these include the many excluded brands you now have no access to it. This also applies to free samples with purchase promo offers, if they included online-only brands that were previously included Canadians can no longer qualify for them, huge bummer!

Also comes a change to their return policy, pre-June 27, 2015 you had 60 days to return items with a receipt, now this is only 30 days. You can read about that here.

I realize they had to make changes and having the warehouse in Canada is good, as orders will hopefully arrive quicker (I get my orders within a week so no complaints here), but why no official announcement? What good is having a warehouse in Canada when many of the items online are restricted from shipping here? I am sure they didn't wake up and decide to move the warehouse to Canada, this took time and planning. Thumbs down to Sephora for lack of communication about this. I would of stocked up on the "online only" products and brands had I know this was coming.

What other stores do you shop at that sell similar products? Perhaps we can help each other out with some other options. I find ESkincareStore is pretty good, based in Canada and sells a lot of the products that Sephora no longer ships.

Read more about the discussion on Sephora's Beautytalk here.

Click here to browse Sephora Canada.