Selling on Amazon USA from Mexico: what you actually need

The conversation almost always starts the same way. A seller who is doing well on Amazon Mexico looks at the size of the United States market, compares it with their own, and concludes that the same product would sell ten times more up north. Sometimes that is true. But between that intuition and the first deposit in dollars there is a list of things to solve, and almost none of them are about the product.

What makes expanding to the United States hard is not opening the account — that is the easy part — but everything that hangs off it: your tax status in front of the US authorities, the regime you export under from Mexico, who acts as importer when the goods cross, how your landed cost per unit is calculated once the inventory sits in an Amazon warehouse in the US, and whether your current margin survives that extra layer of cost.

There is also one change that reshaped the terrain and that older guides still do not reflect: the duty-free treatment for low-value parcels entering the United States stopped applying generally at the end of August 2025. The “I ship small boxes and nothing happens” shortcut no longer exists.

This article is a map of what has to be solved, not a step-by-step form-filling guide. Amazon’s rules and customs rules change often, so every point mentioned here is worth confirming in Seller Central and at the official source before you move money.

the account: one, not two

The first piece of good news is that you do not need a US company to start. Amazon’s own materials aimed at Mexican sellers are explicit: an individual registered with business activity, or a Mexican legal entity, can sign up to sell on Amazon.com. No LLC, no US address required.

The second is that Amazon runs a North America unified account. With a single Seller Central login you can switch between the United States, Canada and Mexico stores, and you pay one Professional plan subscription instead of one per country. The exact amount is charged in dollars and it changes, so confirm it in Seller Central before you budget around it.

The documents Amazon asks for at registration are the ones you already have if you operate formally in Mexico: your SAT tax status certificate, valid government ID, a recent proof of address, an active credit or debit card, and a bank account. A legal entity also needs the legal representative’s ID and a letter authorizing the primary seller.

Getting paid has a local answer too: Amazon can deposit into a Mexican account, either through its currency conversion service or through Seller Wallet. Neither is free, and the exchange rate applied is part of your cost. Write that down, because it comes back later.

The important part of all that is this: the unified account gives you one administrative surface, not one market. The three stores still have different catalogs, different competitors, different fees and different logistics. It is a shared login, not a shared operation.

what changes compared with selling in Mexico

This is where most sellers underestimate the jump. The product is the same, but almost everything around it moves.

• The listing is a different listing. Translating the title is not enough. The US buyer searches with different words, compares against different brands, and expects a different standard of photography and bullets.
• The competition is different. In many categories you will be up against sellers importing directly from Asia at volumes you do not have, and against brands with ad budgets you do not have either.
• Referral fees are charged in dollars and by category, on their own table, which is not the Mexican one. Look it up in Seller Central for your exact category before you run any numbers.
• The cost of a return changes scale. A return in Mexico comes back to you and gets inspected. A return in the United States, with your inventory thousands of kilometers away, often ends in liquidation or disposal.
• The exchange rate enters your P&L. Your costs are in pesos and your revenue is in dollars. A few points of currency movement can move your margin more than any price optimization.

That last one is the most ignored. If you buy in pesos, sell in dollars and convert back, the exchange rate is not an accounting detail: it is a profitability variable you do not control.

Glossary: real net margin, with everything deducted →

taxes are two systems, not one

This section is an overview, not advice. Selling from Mexico into the United States puts you in front of two tax authorities at once, and the right way to handle it depends on your structure, your regime and your volume. Sit down with an accountant who has specific cross-border trade experience before you invoice your first dollar. What follows only tells you what to ask about.

On the US side, three pieces always come up:

• Amazon’s tax interview. When you register, the platform asks you to certify your status. For a foreign seller that is normally resolved with a W-8BEN if you are an individual, or a W-8BEN-E if you are an entity. Amazon’s own materials aimed at Mexican sellers warn that failing to certify your tax status properly can trigger withholding of up to 30% of your proceeds. That is not a penalty: it is the default treatment for an undocumented payment to a foreign person.
• State sales tax. Under marketplace facilitator laws, now in force across sales-tax states, Amazon calculates, collects and remits that tax on sales made through its platform. That does not mean you have no obligations of your own: they can exist if you sell outside Amazon, or depending on where your inventory is stored.
• Federal income tax. This is where the answer becomes genuinely case-dependent, because it brings in whether your activity creates a permanent establishment in the United States and what the treaty between the two countries says about it. There is no generic answer.

On the Mexican side the central question is how you document the export. Exported goods are handled at a 0% VAT rate when properly supported by the corresponding export pedimento. And some goods require registration in the sectoral exporters registry — alcoholic beverages, tobacco, certain metals, plastics, rubber, wood, glass, iron, steel and aluminum, among others — a free procedure with the SAT, but one you need settled before, not after.

None of the above replaces a professional. The right structure for a seller invoicing a hundred thousand pesos a month is not the right structure for one invoicing two million.

customs no longer forgives small parcels

For years there was a comfortable route: ship low-value parcels directly to the US consumer and rely on the de minimis exemption. That is over. The 800-dollar exemption stopped applying to shipments from China and Hong Kong in May 2025, and at the end of August 2025 it was suspended generally, for every origin.

In practice that means low-value shipments entering the United States now require customs entry and pay whatever applies. For a Mexican seller the consequence is concrete: the cost of crossing the border belongs in your per-unit cost from day one, not in a column called unforeseen.

It also means you have to answer a question that used to be dodgeable: who is the importer of record when your goods enter the United States, and who answers for the tariff classification and the duties. Amazon does not import on your behalf when you send inventory into FBA. That is a conversation with a customs broker, and it is the most underestimated part of the whole project.

Since customs policy moves by decree and with little notice, verify the current state at the official source before you book your first shipment.

logistics: three routes and none of them free

There are three real options, and each one pushes your cost and your speed in a different direction.

Ship from Mexico on every order. No forward inventory and no capital tied up, but delivery times that rarely match what the US buyer expects, and a high per-unit shipping cost. Good for testing demand, not for scaling.

Send inventory into FBA in the United States. Amazon stores, packs, ships and handles customer service, and you do not need a US address to use it. In exchange, you commit capital to inventory sitting on the other side of a border, you pay fulfillment and storage fees in dollars, and you accept a replenishment cycle that gets longer because of the crossing.

Use a 3PL in the United States. It gives you control over the inventory, lets you serve other channels from the same warehouse, and is usually the exit when Amazon storage gets expensive. In exchange, you add one more actor to the chain and one more report to reconcile.

Whichever route you take, your lead time stops being your supplier’s lead time and starts including consolidation, crossing, clearance and warehouse receiving. Planning replenishment with the old lead time is the fastest way to run out of stock in peak season.

Glossary: lead time, your real replenishment clock →

the real cost per unit, before you decide

The math that decides whether the expansion makes sense is not gross margin, it is landed cost plus everything Amazon deducts. Here is a deliberately made-up example, so you can see the order of the pieces:

A product you plan to list at 29.99 dollars. Assume a 15% referral fee in its category, which is 4.50 dollars. Assume an FBA fulfillment fee of 5.50 dollars. Your cost of goods is 180 pesos and you convert at an assumed rate of 18 pesos per dollar, so 10.00 dollars. International freight, clearance and duty prorated add another 2.00 dollars per unit.

Costs total 22.00 dollars. You keep 7.99 dollars, or 26.6% of the price. That looks fine until you add advertising: if you need to spend 10% of revenue to move units, that is 3.00 dollars more and the margin drops to 4.99 dollars, or 16.6%. If your category also runs high returns, the bank conversion costs you, and the peso moves two points against you, that 16.6% keeps thinning out.

None of those percentages is market data: they are assumptions in an example. You have to replace them with yours, taken from the fee table for your category in Seller Central, from an actual quote from your customs broker, and from your cost of goods delivered to the border. The arithmetic is simple; getting the right inputs is the work.

how the expansion reads in iqseller

Opening Amazon United States does not add a channel: it adds a set of numbers that have to coexist with the ones you already check. The same product now has two prices, two fee structures, two physical inventories and two currencies. Across five tabs that is unreadable.

In iqseller that product exists once in the Catalog, with its Parent → Model → SKU tree, and every listing hangs off the same master SKU. The Inventory module shows stock split by location — FBA, Full, 3PL, your own warehouse — so the inventory sitting across the border never gets confused with what is available in Mexico.

Profitability is where the real question gets answered. Net margin per SKU is built from the COGS you load and from what the platform actually deducted: Amazon settlement commissions, FBA fees, shipping and advertising. Next to that, the VAT and withholding breakdown shows what belongs to your Mexican operation. The result is what you were after: the same product’s margin, channel by channel, comparable.

Forecast and Alerts close the loop. The forecast uses each channel’s real sales velocity to say how much to reorder, and alerts flag critical stock before the long crossing lead time turns into a stockout. The point is not having another panel: it is that the new channel does not force you to open one.

when it makes sense and when it does not

It makes sense when your margin in Mexico is already healthy with room to spare, when your product has a reason to exist in a US catalog beyond being cheap, when your weight-to-value ratio keeps freight from eating the profit, and when you have capital you can leave parked for several months without squeezing the local operation.

It does not make sense when you are expanding to escape a margin problem in Mexico — the problem travels with you and arrives more expensive — when your product is bulky and cheap, when you depend on a single supplier with an unstable lead time, or when you still cannot say from memory what your net margin per SKU is in the channel you already run.

That last one is the honest test. If today you do not know exactly what you earn per unit on Amazon Mexico, opening the United States will not give you the answer: it will give you the same question in two currencies. Close the number here first, then take the two topics this article could only outline to your accountant and your customs broker.