General questions about border crossing

[Stevey87]

I've been looking at online stores for awhile now and it seems like dry goods are much cheaper in the states. I am going to spend about 400 to 800 CDN and get it shipped to WA US and I talked to a parcel holding place that holds stuff for like 5 bucks or something. They said a lot of Canadians do it. The problem is coming back to Canada. They tax a lot from what I heard. I used to cross borders to buy American lottos (the huge ones) and I never got searched by Canadian customs. I did get checked by the US customs tho. So this got me wondering.... whatever I tell the US customs, that info goes straight to the Canadian customs? hence Canadian customs never searching me.

Another question is what's allowed and how much and how much is the tax? Anyone have any experience with this?