Selling on Amazon from Vietnam: what it actually takes

What you need to open an Amazon seller account from Vietnam

Vietnam is on Amazon's list of accepted seller countries, for both the North American and the European marketplaces. You do not need a US or EU company to open an account. What you do need is a Vietnamese legal entity with clean paperwork and a document set that matches itself down to the detail.

Amazon assesses the application against payments-industry customer identification standards, not against judgement or relationships. What is normally required:

The most common failure is not a missing document but documents that disagree with each other. The name on the passport is written without Vietnamese diacritics while the business registration carries them. The registered office address differs from the address on the bank statement. The person signing is not the person named on the licence. Verification is strict about names and addresses matching across documents, and a rejected application can delay everything behind it by weeks. Get the set complete before you click register, and expect a video verification call.

On selling plans, you choose between Individual, which charges a fee per item sold, and Professional, which is a monthly subscription. On Amazon.com the Professional plan is currently USD 39.99 per month. The European marketplaces set their own subscription in local currency; those amounts are not conversions of the US figure, so check the current amount for the exact marketplace you intend to sell on. Anyone intending to put stock into Amazon's warehouses should be on Professional from day one, because Individual does not unlock several tools you will need.

• A current business registration certificate.
• Passport or national ID for the legal representative and for the beneficial owners — Amazon typically asks about anyone holding 25% or more of the company.
• A recently issued bank or credit card statement showing exactly the name and address you registered.
• A valid, internationally chargeable credit card for Amazon to bill fees to.
• A mailing address that matches the address on the documents.

How the money gets back to a Vietnamese company

Amazon disburses on a cycle, in the marketplace currency: USD for Amazon.com, EUR or GBP in Europe. Proceeds can only be paid to a bank account in a country and currency Amazon supports for disbursement, and that list changes over time — check it in Seller Central before you design the money flow. In practice today, Vietnamese sellers receive into an international receiving account with a provider such as Payoneer, WorldFirst or Lianlian, then remit to a domestic bank; those are common examples, not recommendations, and Tacke Infotech has no partnership with any of them. Receiving and repatriating export revenue is also subject to Vietnamese foreign exchange rules, and your company's bank will have its own documentation requirements — ask the bank before you commit to a flow.

The hard part sits on the Vietnamese side, not the Amazon side. That money is your company's export revenue: it has to be recorded, declared and subject to corporate income tax. The standard rate is 20%, but under the 2025 Corporate Income Tax Law a company with total annual revenue up to VND 3 billion is taxed at 15%, and from VND 3 to 50 billion at 17%, subject to conditions on related parties; your company may also fall under other incentives. Establish the rate that actually applies to your company with your accountant or tax adviser. Exported goods qualify for 0% VAT, but only where the required documentation exists: the export customs declaration, a contract, and proof of payment through a bank.

For Amazon retail, that document set looks nothing like traditional export. There is no foreign trade contract with a single buyer. Money arrives in batched disbursements net of fees, and does not reconcile one-to-one with individual orders. This is where accountants and banks get stuck most often. Agree the accounting treatment and the reconciliation method with your accountant from the very first shipment, rather than unpicking it at year end.

One point on practice: sales proceeds should land in the company's own account, not the director's personal account. That is the normal way to keep the export documentation chain intact, because the 0% VAT treatment rests on payment evidence in the name of the exporting entity. How to handle it in your specific case is something to agree with your accountant or tax adviser.

FBA or FBM: decide by the product, not by preference

FBA means you send stock into Amazon's warehouses and Amazon picks, packs, ships, handles customer service and processes returns. FBM means you do all of that yourself. For the same product, the two models produce completely different cost structures and completely different customer experiences.

For goods shipped directly from Vietnam, FBM is close to uncompetitive. American buyers expect delivery in two days, and a parcel sent from Vietnam takes considerably longer than that, particularly once clearance is counted. A listing without the Prime badge loses in direct comparison. On top of that, the USD 800 de minimis exemption (Section 321) was suspended for goods from China and Hong Kong in May 2025 and for goods from all countries from 29 August 2025; CBP later extended the suspension indefinitely, and US law repeals the exemption outright for commercial shipments from 1 July 2027. This is a moving policy — re-check what is in force at the time you quote. The broad effect is that the cost advantage of cross-border parcel shipping is no longer what it was. FBM makes sense only when you already hold stock in the market, or when the product is oversized, heavy, fragile, or in a category Amazon will not accept into its warehouses.

In exchange, FBA carries its own costs: a fulfilment fee per unit based on size and weight, storage fees charged by volume and higher in the peak season, long-term storage fees on aged inventory, fees tied to how inbound stock is distributed across warehouses, and the cost of processing returns. The FBA fee schedule changes from year to year — take the current schedule for the marketplace you are selling on when you build a cost model. Alongside these is the referral fee Amazon takes on every order, a percentage of the sale price that varies by category. Most categories fall between 8 and 15%, but some are markedly higher (apparel, jewellery, Amazon device accessories), many are tiered by price point, and there is a minimum fee per unit. Look up your actual category in the current fee schedule instead of using one blanket number. The referral fee applies to FBA and FBM alike. The line-by-line breakdown is in our post on Amazon FBA selling costs.

The right way to choose is to build a landed-cost model to the Amazon warehouse: ex-works price, plus retail packaging, plus freight, plus import duty at the HS code of your product, plus prep-warehouse fees. Import VAT is a separate item, not the same thing as duty: it has to be funded at clearance, and a VAT-registered importer of record can normally recover it through its returns, whereas duty stays in the cost of goods. Then subtract Amazon's fees and an advertising budget from your expected selling price. If what remains is too thin, the problem is the product, not the fulfilment model.

How inventory travels from the factory to an Amazon warehouse

There is no version of this where you load a container at the factory and send it straight into an Amazon fulfilment centre. Amazon will not act as importer of record for seller-owned goods in any marketplace. Someone else has to be named as importer, responsible for the declaration, liable for import duty, and exposed to post-clearance audit. That can be your own entity in the destination country, or your Vietnamese company where the law allows it: in the US a foreign company can be the importer of record if it has a customs bond, a CBP-assigned number and a US agent for service of process; in the EU a non-EU business generally needs an indirect customs representative established in the EU to act for it. That has to be solved before you even discuss freight rates.

The real path a shipment takes has six steps:

The prep-warehouse step is not compulsory. A factory can apply FNSKU labels and meet Amazon's carton requirements at origin and ship straight into the fulfilment centres; many do. But a warehouse at the receiving end lets you deal with what comes up: Amazon splits inventory across multiple centres, its labelling and carton weight rules are strict, and it refuses shipments that do not comply. Relabelling, resplitting or rescuing a rejected shipment from Vietnam over email is slower and more expensive than paying a warehouse in the market to handle it.

The legal obligations at the receiving end are where the two markets diverge most. The US needs a named importer of record, a customs bond, an importer number and category-specific registrations; the detail is in our post on Amazon FBA services for the Americas. Europe needs an EORI number for the importer — that is a customs identifier, not a VAT number, and holding one does not replace VAT registration — plus VAT registration in the country where stock is held, and packaging extended producer responsibility registration; the detail is in our post on Amazon FBA services for Europe. Two points to remember immediately: a business not established in the EU that stores goods in a member state must register for VAT there, with no exemption threshold; and packaging EPR registration must be complete before packaged goods are placed on the market, under each country's own rules — do not read one member state's regime across to another.

• Full retail packaging done at the factory, with barcodes, correct-language labelling and all mandatory information already printed.
• Export customs declaration in Vietnam and issue of the bill of lading.
• Sea freight (cheap, slow) or air freight (expensive, fast) to the destination port or airport.
• Import clearance by the named importer of record: the declaration, payment of import duty, and funding import VAT where the destination country collects it at clearance.
• Delivery to a prep warehouse in the market for counting, FNSKU labelling, cartonisation and splitting — or doing that work at the factory if you are confident about the labelling and carton standards.
• Delivery into the Amazon fulfilment centres Amazon designates — usually several, not one.

Realistic timelines, and cash flow

In our experience, from decision to first order a first market usually takes three to six months, provided the category is not heavily regulated. That is our own figure, not an industry benchmark. For food, cosmetics, supplements, children's products or electrical goods, add several months for registrations, testing and labelling.

The individual milestones normally fall roughly as follows:

More important than the timeline is the cash. You pay for production, freight, import duty and registrations up front. Sales proceeds only arrive on Amazon's disbursement cycle, and then there is another leg before the money reaches Vietnam. The first shipment is typically cash-negative for months. Size your working capital on the slow-selling scenario, not the good one.

• Account opening and verification: a few weeks, if the documents match.
• Trademark: file as early as you can. A filed application is not a registered trademark — in the US, filing to registration commonly runs over a year; in the EU it is usually a few months where there is no opposition. Brand Registry accepts a registered trademark, or a pending application, in the jurisdiction of that marketplace.
• Compliance registrations in the destination country: run in parallel. The legal deadline differs by obligation — EORI and importer-of-record standing must be in place before clearance; VAT registration before stock is stored and sold in that country; packaging EPR registration before the goods are placed on the market. We still aim to have all of it done before the goods leave the factory, but that is a safety margin we set ourselves, not the legal deadline.
• First production run plus transit: Vietnam to the US West Coast is typically three to four weeks port to port on a direct service, longer via transshipment. Northern Europe depends heavily on routing: roughly four to five weeks via the Suez Canal, and about two weeks more when the carrier routes around the Cape of Good Hope, which is how most of the main strings are currently running. Take the actual schedule and transit time from the carrier for your own lane rather than using a general number. Air freight cuts that to days at several times the cost.
• Amazon receiving and activating the inventory: several days to two weeks after arrival at the warehouse.
• Listing running steadily, first reviews in, advertising with enough data: several more weeks.

Your own brand, or supplying someone else's

This is a bigger decision than FBA versus FBM. Supplying an established seller means you need no account, carry no compliance burden at the receiving end, get paid quickly, and work under a contract you already understand. In exchange you have no customer data, no control over price, no brand asset being built, and you can be replaced by a cheaper factory at any time.

Owning the brand is the inverse. The listing, the reviews, the price and the relationship with the buyer are yours, and that value compounds year on year. But you carry all of the trademark registration, product compliance, advertising, returns and inventory risk. It is a different business from manufacturing, and it needs its own people and its own budget.

There is a legal point many factories miss: trademarks are territorial. A trademark registered in Vietnam gives you no protection in the US or the EU. Amazon Brand Registry accepts a registered trademark, or a pending application, in the jurisdiction of that marketplace — but a filed application is not a registration, and the full right to stop others using the mark arrives with registration. In the US specifically, applicants domiciled outside the country are required to be represented by a US-licensed attorney. In the US, filing to registration commonly runs over a year; in the EU it is usually a few months where there is no opposition. File well ahead of your selling plan.

The honest advice: many factories should start by supplying one good seller while watching the category data, and only then launch their own brand in one market with one SKU family. Doing four markets and ten SKUs at once is the fastest way to burn the capital without learning anything clearly.

Selling on Amazon from Vietnam: where to start

Pick one market and one product family. Check whether the category is restricted or gated before you spend a single dong on packaging or photography. Build the landed-cost model to the Amazon warehouse with real numbers: a freight quote for your actual lane, and the duty rate for the HS code of your actual product. Once you have chosen a market, the receiving-end obligations are set out in our posts on Amazon FBA services for Europe and Amazon FBA services for the Americas.

We run our own brands on this same system: Hoasipho, Matelier, NANANA Golf and Pomte. Matelier carries the heaviest compliance load: VAT in Germany, France and Spain, with OSS for cross-border sales inside the EU; packaging EPR (LUCID registration under VerpackG plus a contract with a dual system in Germany; producer-register entry and membership of a collective compliance scheme in Spain, which in our case is Ecoembes); food business operator registration; EU food labelling; an EORI number; and HS classification. What is written here is what we do every day, not theory we read.