The US Compliance Checklist for South Asian Exporters

Every month we talk with manufacturers in Dhaka, Karachi, Colombo, and Tirupur who have the product, the margins, and the export experience to win on Amazon US — and who stall for six months on the same five questions. Do I need a US company? How does US tax touch me? How do I get Brand Registry without a US address? Which certificates does my category need? And what paperwork keeps my container out of customs limbo and my account out of Amazon's freezer?

This checklist answers those questions in the order you should tackle them. It is the compliance half of the bridge we map in the Bangladesh-to-US Amazon guide; the commercial half — pricing, positioning, listings — lives in the regional marketplace playbook.

Do you need a US company to sell on Amazon from South Asia?

No. Amazon accepts seller registrations from most South Asian countries — Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka among them — and thousands of manufacturers sell on Amazon US as foreign entities. You register with your home-country company documents, pass identity verification, complete the tax interview as a foreign entity, and receive payouts through a cross-border payment provider. Check the current accepted-countries list during registration, but for most exporters the direct path is open.

So why do so many exporters form a US LLC anyway? Because a US entity smooths everything around Amazon: a US bank account cuts payout conversion costs, US wholesale buyers and 3PLs prefer contracting with a US company, some compliance registrations move faster with a US address, and a clean US entity makes an eventual exit or investment conversation simpler. The tradeoff is real too — a foreign-owned single-member LLC must file Form 5472 with a pro forma 1120 every year, and penalties for missing it start at $25,000. An LLC is not a checkbox; it is an ongoing obligation.

Our field rule: start as your home entity if you are validating demand, and form the LLC once the numbers justify the annual compliance overhead. Forming a US company before your first sale adds cost and filing obligations at exactly the moment you need speed.

Choosing your selling entity

Three structures cover nearly every exporter we work with. The comparison below is the orientation version — an attorney should confirm the fit, especially where a tax treaty between your country and the US changes the math.

If you take the LLC route, the state matters less than sellers think — Wyoming and Delaware are popular for cost and privacy, but Amazon does not care which state issued your certificate. What Amazon cares about is that the entity name matches every other document you submit. Hold that thought; it returns in the failure-modes section.

Tax registration in plain terms

US tax for foreign sellers is less frightening than the forums suggest, because the two scariest-sounding pieces — federal income tax and state sales tax — are both narrower than they first appear. The paperwork, in order:

• EIN. The federal tax ID. Foreign companies get one with Form SS-4 by fax or phone — no US Social Security number required. You need it for the LLC, for many compliance registrations, and for wholesale relationships.
• Amazon's tax interview. A foreign entity completes a W-8BEN-E certifying non-US status; a US LLC completes a W-9. Do this accurately — a mismatch between the tax interview and your legal registration is a classic verification trigger.
• Federal income tax. Whether your Amazon profits are taxed in the US depends on facts an accountant must assess — your structure, your activities, and any treaty between your country and the US. Budget for a professional opinion here; it is the one place guessing gets expensive.
• State sales tax. Mostly handled for you — see below.

Marketplace facilitator law

A state law making the marketplace — Amazon — responsible for calculating, collecting, and remitting sales tax on third-party sales. Every US state with a sales tax now has one, which is why marketplace-only sellers generally do not register state by state.

The practical consequence: if you sell only on Amazon, sales tax is largely Amazon's job. The moment you add your own Shopify or DTC channel, you own the question of where you have nexus and must collect — that is a different project, and one to scope before launching the channel, not after.

How do you get Brand Registry as a foreign manufacturer?

Brand Registry requires a registered or pending trademark from the trademark office of a country Amazon accepts — for Amazon US, that effectively means the USPTO. Two facts shape the whole process for South Asian applicants. First, the USPTO requires foreign-domiciled applicants to be represented by a US-licensed attorney; you cannot file directly from Dhaka or Karachi. Second, Brand Registry accepts a pending application, so you do not wait the year-plus a full registration can take — you enroll on the serial number.

1. 1

   Clear the name before you love it

   Run a knockout search of the USPTO database before committing to packaging and listings. A conflict discovered after you have printed cartons is a five-figure mistake in any currency.

2. 2

   File through a US-licensed attorney

   Required for foreign-domiciled applicants, and worth it anyway — a properly drafted goods-and-services description avoids office actions that stall applications for months. Amazon's IP Accelerator program is one route to vetted firms; any competent US trademark attorney works.

3. 3

   Prefer a word mark

   A standard-character word mark protects the name in any styling and is what Brand Registry keys on. File the logo separately later if the brand justifies it.

4. 4

   Enroll Brand Registry on the serial number

   Once the application is on file, enroll with the serial number and matching brand name. Approval unlocks A+ Content, brand analytics, and the listing controls that make Rufus-era optimization possible.

Product compliance by category

US product compliance is not one regime — it is a patchwork keyed to what you sell. Amazon enforces the patchwork by asking for documents, sometimes years after launch, with short response windows. The table covers the categories South Asian exporters ship most.

Children's Product Certificate (CPC)

The certificate a manufacturer or importer must issue for any product designed primarily for children 12 and under, based on passing tests performed by a CPSC-accepted third-party laboratory. General-use products subject to a CPSC rule need the self-issued equivalent, a General Certificate of Conformity (GCC).

The pattern worth internalizing: certificates are cheap when planned into production and brutal when retrofitted. A CPSC-accepted lab test scheduled alongside your production run costs days; the same test demanded by Amazon while your listing is suppressed costs weeks of dead inventory.

Customs documentation that keeps freight moving

Customs is where compliance stops being abstract. A container that clears in a day and a container that sits for three weeks usually carried the same product — what differed was the paperwork. One structural fact drives everything: Amazon will not act as the importer of record for FBA shipments. Someone else must be, and deciding who is your first customs decision.

Importer of record (IOR)

The party legally responsible for a shipment's entry into the US — accurate classification, duty payment, and compliance with every applicable regulation. For a South Asian exporter this is typically your US entity, or you as a foreign importer of record with a customs bond and a broker.

• Commercial invoice and packing list that match each other, the physical goods, and your Amazon shipment plan. Discrepancies invite exams.
• HTS classification. The ten-digit code that sets your duty rate. Classify with your broker before quoting US prices — duty is a cost of goods, not a surprise.
• Country-of-origin marking on the product itself, not just the carton, per US marking rules.
• A customs bond — continuous, if you ship regularly — and an ISF (10+2) filing lodged before ocean cargo loads at origin.
• Formal entries by default. The de minimis exemption that once let low-value parcels skip formal entry was eliminated for commercial shipments in 2025. Plan every shipment as a formal entry with a broker.

The failure modes that freeze accounts

Almost every frozen seller account we are asked to rescue traces to one of five preventable causes — and four of them are paperwork, not product.

• Name mismatches. The company name on your Amazon account, bank statement, utility bill, and registration certificate must match character for character. Transliteration drift — one document says Ltd., another Limited — is the single most common verification failure for South Asian sellers.
• INFORM Act lapses. US law requires marketplaces to verify high-volume sellers' bank, tax, and contact details, with annual recertification. An ignored verification email suspends the account automatically — no human decided anything.
• Missing certificates on demand. Amazon can request a CPC, GCC, or lab report at any time, with response windows measured in days. If the certificate exists only at your factory in a drawer, it does not exist.
• Trademark owned by the wrong party. The agent-owned trademark trap above — it also breaks Brand Registry retroactively.
• Related-account flags. Sharing a consultant's laptops, networks, or credentials links your account to every other account they touch. One bad actor in the pool can take the whole pool down.

The sequence that works

Order matters because the slow items — trademark examination, lab testing, bank setup — run in parallel only if you start them early. Here is the sequence we run with every manufacturer:

Run in this order, the whole checklist fits inside one production cycle. Run out of order — packaging printed before the trademark clears, inventory on the water before the IOR question is answered — and each mistake costs a quarter. This is exactly the operational work our Manufacturers on Amazon service exists to compress: we are not your lawyers, but we have walked this bridge enough times to keep you off every landmine on it.