I hope avoiding Amazon fits this community rules?
I need a few bits to resurrect an old PC. My Amazon cart is $68 with shipping - we're going to cancel Prime, but my wife is still working on downloading all her photos. Best I can do elsewhere is near double this PLUS shipping from 3 different suppliers and 2 of the suppliers are on eBay, which is also a US company.
I moved to Canada a few years ago from Australia where I had pccasegear, scorptec and others. It seems Canadians have become reliant on the US market and Amazon and we now have no competitive local retailers for this type of thing?
You can also try canadacomputers.com, while they did have a few incidents of price gouging during the big GPU shortage a few years back they are pretty reliable with having stock and semi-reasonable prices.
Also: check out ca.partpicker.com they do a good job of listing a variety of Canadian sites and their current hardware prices while you check part compatibility and power requirements all in one place.
Thanks for the suggestion. I know about PC Part Picker. The sites they list mainly sell current technology, which makes sense but it's not what I'm after. This stuff is for an old PC. It's not urgent - I'm watching FB marketplace for used memory and also considering buying direct from China, with slooow shipping, for the SSD and cable.
I used to work at Canada Computers, years back. They're still my go-to place for buying computer parts. Apparently they treat their employees pretty good these days too; some old coworkers of mine are telling me how they got big pay bumps, profit sharing and benefits. I actually tried to get an assistant manager to come over to a nice white collar corporate gig with me and he said no because CC were paying him better than we could.
Tonne of nepotism up at head office level, and generally the corporate management sucks in all the ways that retail corporate management usually suck, but they're a hell of a lot better than Amazon, Newegg or Best Buy.
Consider putting a wanted ad out locally on kijiji (instead of marketplace for the love of god people, we have had a better canadian alternative this whole time that isnt owned by US big tech). I've had good luck with that for old tech since chances are someone has something that'll work sitting in a bin collecting dust otherwise.