How much does it cost to sell on Amazon USA from India?
Most Indian sellers overestimate the legal setup cost and badly underestimate the ongoing fee drag. This is an honest, itemized look at what it actually takes to launch and run an Amazon USA business from India in 2026 — the one-time costs to get live, the recurring fees that eat margin, and a sample first-year budget you can adapt to your own product.
One-time setup: US LLC + EIN, US address, brand registry basics — a few hundred dollars, not thousands.
Per shipment: freight from India + customs duty, sized to volume.
Ongoing: Amazon referral (~15%) + FBA fulfillment + storage, plus optional PPC and software.
Reality: fulfillment and ads, not setup, decide whether you are profitable.
What's in this guide
The two buckets: setup vs ongoing
It helps to split costs into two buckets. The first is one-time setup: the legal and structural pieces you pay for once to become a legitimate US seller. The second is ongoing: the per-unit and per-month costs that recur as long as you sell. New sellers fixate on the first bucket because it feels like the barrier, but it is the second bucket that determines whether your business makes money. A cheap setup with sloppy unit economics loses money every month; a slightly higher setup that nails fulfillment and pricing compounds.
One-time setup costs
The structural foundation is a US LLC, an EIN for that entity, and a usable US business address. Forming an LLC in a sensible state plus obtaining the EIN is a modest one-time cost — typically in the low hundreds of dollars when done correctly, not the inflated figures some agencies quote. On top of that you may invest in product photography, a brand, and Amazon Brand Registry (which requires a trademark). None of this recurs monthly, and it is the same foundation you would reuse for Walmart or your own store later.
Our US LLC + EIN service handles the entity, EIN, and address as one package, and you can sanity-check the numbers with our US LLC cost calculator.
Per-shipment costs from India
Every time you restock, you pay to move goods from India to the US and to clear customs. Freight cost depends on mode — air is fast and expensive, ocean is slow and cheap per unit — and on volume, since consolidating into fuller shipments lowers the per-unit rate sharply. Customs duty is a percentage of declared value that varies by product category. The practical lever here is shipment sizing: importing in larger, less frequent batches cuts per-unit freight, which is why buffer storage in a US warehouse pays for itself.
Estimate this for your product with the India-USA shipping calculator, and see how our freight service consolidates shipments to lower per-unit cost.
Amazon's ongoing fees
Amazon takes a referral fee on each sale — commonly around 15% depending on category — plus FBA fulfillment fees based on the size and weight of your product, plus storage fees that climb steeply in Q4. There is also the Professional selling plan's flat monthly fee. These are the costs that quietly decide your margin: a product that looks profitable on paper can break even once referral, fulfillment, and storage are stacked on. Running the math per unit before you import is non-negotiable.
Plug your product into the FBA fee calculator and profit margin calculator to see real unit economics before you commit stock.
Software, ads, and the hidden line items
Beyond Amazon's own fees, budget for the things that make a launch competitive: PPC advertising to get initial visibility, a keyword and analytics tool, and possibly a virtual assistant for listing and customer-message work. Advertising is the line item most likely to balloon, because new products need ad spend to gain ranking before organic sales take over. Treat early PPC as a customer-acquisition investment with a target ACOS, not an open tap.
A sample first-year budget
A realistic first year for a focused single-product launch looks like this in shape, if not exact rupees: a few hundred dollars of one-time setup, an initial inventory and freight outlay sized to your first order, then monthly recurring costs dominated by Amazon fulfillment fees and a controlled PPC budget. The setup is the smallest line. Inventory and fulfillment are the largest. Plan working capital for at least two restock cycles before sales reliably fund the next order, because cash flow — not setup cost — is what sinks most new sellers.
Where most sellers waste money
The common money leaks are predictable: overpaying agencies for a basic LLC, air-freighting stock that could have gone by ocean, sending everything to FBA and eating storage fees on slow inventory, and pouring PPC into a product whose margins never supported ads in the first place. Almost every one of these traces back to skipping the unit-economics math up front. Get the per-unit numbers right, size shipments sensibly, and the business becomes boringly predictable — which is exactly what you want.
Want a costed plan for your specific product? Get a free quote or compare options on our pricing page.