How to Sell on Amazon USA from India: A 2026 Step-by-Step Guide

Selling on Amazon USA from India is one of the highest-payoff moves an Indian D2C brand can make in 2026. The market is roughly $540 billion in annual e-commerce GMV, the customer pays in dollars, and the rails — Amazon Global Selling — exist specifically for brands like yours.

But 70% of attempted launches fail in the first six months. Not because the product is wrong. Because the unglamorous middle layer — entities, licences, freight, ads, returns — never gets run as one operation. Here is the order of operations we run, week by week.

1. Form a US LLC + EIN (weeks 1–3).
2. Register IEC, AD Code, and LUT in India (weeks 1–2, in parallel).
3. Open Amazon Seller Central US via Amazon Global Selling (weeks 2–4).
4. File a USPTO trademark and apply to Brand Registry 2.0 (weeks 2–6).
5. Build local US English listings + A+ content (weeks 4–6).
6. Plan freight: air for the first 200 units, sea for scale (weeks 4–8).
7. FBA prep: FNSKU, polybagging, country-of-origin labels (week 7).
8. Launch Sponsored Products from day 1 of live listings (week 8 onwards).

What does it cost? Set-up — LLC, EIN, accounts, brand registry, IEC/AD Code, freight booking — runs $2,500 to $5,000. Inventory: budget 3–6 months of safety stock. Air freight runs 6–10× sea cost per unit but lets you test in a single freight cycle. Ads: $1,000–$3,000/month for the first 90 days, then optimise to 12–18% TACoS as you mature.

The single biggest mistake we see: stocking out in week 5 because the freight cycle for restock was not booked at the same time as the first shipment. Amazon’s A9 algorithm punishes stockouts in the launch window aggressively — two identical brands can diverge by 10× because one of them ran out at week 5.

If you want to skip the planning loop and get a 90-day launch plan written for your category, ScalerLabs runs Amazon Global Selling launches end-to-end. Free 30-minute audit, plan delivered in 48 hours.