Hi Fellow MINI enthusiasts!

With some less than "ideal" experiences with current online vendors that offer MINI and BMW parts across the border to Canada, I'm reaching out to see what Vendors fellow Canadian enthusiasts have had good results with.
As an avid enthusiast, I work on MINI's at my home based shop including my own 05 JCW.. I've used pretty much every Vendor that I could find at one time or another and found its always a balance between selection, quality of parts, availability and of course cost.

Being in Canada, I find that outside of OEM, there are few good in-Country suppliers, and a growing list of US based ones that are reluctant to ship- cross border or charge unrealistic shipping/handling rates.

I'd love to continue working and driving MINI's but the difficulty in acquiring parts becomes a real damper on the affordability and viability of doing so...especially performance pieces!

Love to hear your experiences and any suggestions as to whom and where you have sourced your parts

Cheers and thanks !

 

Duuuude. Nice shop!

I know what you mean about Canadian performance aftermarket parts suppliers being hard to come by. I'm lucky enough that I'm only a 50 minute drive awayfrom the US border, so at least I have that as an advantage. But I too have lost access to some US vendors due to their unwillingness to conduct business with folks outside the USA. It's really too bad since we Canadians are on the same landmass.

The high shipping fees aren't the vendors' fault though: you can blame that on on shipping companies like UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc. They're the ones robbing us blind on shipping and charging ridiculous brokerage fees.

The only Canadian companies I've dealt with so far are TDOT Performance https://www.tdotperformance.ca/ and Auto Parts Way https://www.autopartsway.ca/ and of course Amazon.ca
So far, so good. But parts selection is still pretty lame.

 

Thanks for the info...Haven't used TDOT but have used Auto Parts Way (once) and have definitely used Amazon!
Amazon is great especially for service but as you mentioned not so good for selection!