How do I start selling in America from the UK?

Start with the storefront you already have. US customers can buy from a UK Shopify or WooCommerce store as-is, so the work is in the three things that break: shipping cost, delivery time, and who pays import charges. Set a US shipping zone with a rate you can actually honour, publish a delivery window you can hit, and decide up front whether you or the customer covers duty. You do not need a US entity, a US warehouse, or a rebrand to take the first order.

Do I need a US company to sell to US customers?

No. A UK company can sell and ship to US consumers without incorporating in the US. What can arise separately is state sales tax: most US states apply economic nexus thresholds based on your sales into that state, and when you sell through a marketplace the platform usually collects and remits on your behalf. Thresholds vary by state and change, so confirm your position with an accountant who handles US sales tax before you scale.

Can a UK business sell on Amazon US?

Yes. Amazon's global selling programme lets a UK-registered business list on amazon.com, either shipping each order itself or sending stock into Amazon's US fulfilment network. Shipping your own orders keeps control and avoids committing stock overseas, but it puts you back on per-parcel international rates — which is the cost problem consolidation solves.

How does the US de minimis rule affect UK sellers?

Until 29 August 2025, shipments under $800 entered the US duty-free under the de minimis exemption. That exemption was removed: every shipment now faces applicable duties, taxes and fees regardless of value or origin, and needs a full declaration entry. For UK sellers this means import charges are a line on every US order, so decide whether you absorb them in your pricing or bill the customer at delivery.

How do I set up US shipping on a Shopify store based in the UK?

In Shopify, add the United States as a shipping zone and attach a rate to it — flat, weight-based, or carrier-calculated. The decision that matters is what sits behind that rate. Per-parcel international post makes the honest rate high enough to lose you the sale; a consolidated service lowers the underlying cost so the rate you show is one customers accept. ParcelStak connects to Shopify directly, or through our API if you sell elsewhere.

Can I offer free US shipping from a UK store?

Free shipping is never free — it means absorbing the cost into your product price or your margin. Whether that works depends entirely on your cost per parcel. At £15 to £20 a parcel it usually doesn't on a typical basket. Bring the per-parcel cost down far enough and it becomes a pricing decision rather than an impossible one, which is why larger brands can advertise it and smaller ones generally can't.

What's the best country for a UK business to expand to?

For most UK ecommerce brands, the United States. It shares your language and much of your taste, so nothing about the brand needs rebuilding; American shoppers spend more per order than European ones; and ecommerce is a smaller share of US retail than UK retail, meaning the market is still growing rather than saturated. The obstacle has never been demand — it's the cost of getting parcels there.

How to Sell to US Customers from a UK Store (Without Losing Money on Shipping)

Blog How to Sell to US Customers from a UK Store (Without Losing Money on Shipping)

Most UK store owners hit the same wall.

Not a dramatic one. A quiet one.

Sales are fine. The first hundred orders came in. Then the first thousand. The store works. The product works.

And then growth just… flattens.

So you do what every sensible owner does. You go looking for more revenue.

And you're usually offered two doors.

Door one: squeeze the UK market harder

Push more ad spend. Test new creative. Try a different region. Retarget the people who already know you.

It works. For a while.

But here's the thing nobody tells you about door one.

You're paying more each year to reach the same island. Cost per acquisition in the UK ecommerce market rose 6.63% year on year.¹ Traffic gets pricier. The pool doesn't get bigger.

And the basket is shrinking. UK ecommerce average order value was £122.02 in March 2026 — down 3.6% on the year before, from £126.60.²

Read that again.

More orders. Less money per order. Higher cost to get each one.

That's not a growth ceiling. That's a slow leak.

Door two: expand your UK business to another country

This is the door most founders eventually walk toward. And it's the right one.

But then the question gets hard.

Which country?

Because there are roughly 195 of them and only three things actually matter:

1. Do they look like the customers we already convert? Same language. Same taste. Same way of shopping. No rebuild of the brand.

2. Do they spend the same or more per order?

3. Are they — being blunt — less tight with money than UK shoppers?

Run those three filters and almost everything drops out.

What's left is the United States.

Why sell to US customers instead of UK customers

Look at what Americans actually spend per checkout versus Europe.

The Americas average $183 per order. EMEA averages $128.³

That's roughly a 43% bigger basket for the same product, the same photos, the same ad.

Now add the second thing.

UK ecommerce runs at 27.3% of all retail. The US sits at 16.9%.⁴

That sounds like a point against America. It isn't. It's the opposite.

The UK is a mature, saturated online market. Everyone's already shopping online, and everyone's already fighting for them.

The US is a far larger population, spending more per order, with a smaller share of retail online — and that share is still climbing.

That's a market that hasn't finished growing yet.

And Americans are already shopping abroad. 97% of US consumers report shopping with an international seller.⁵

They're not suspicious of a British brand.

They like a British brand.

So why isn't every UK store already selling to America?

Because of one number.

Spend twenty minutes researching and you'll find it.

A small box. Nothing heavy. To a customer in Ohio.

£12 to £20.

How much does it cost to ship from the UK to the USA?

Royal Mail International Tracked runs £12.17 for a small parcel up to 250g, and £17.53 by 1kg.⁶ Retail courier rates on a 1kg parcel reach around £42.⁷

[IMAGE: Post Office counter queue / Royal Mail international rate card]

And the cheap options aren't really options. Royal Mail International Economy has a delivery aim of 42 days.⁸

Forty-two days.

No American customer is waiting six weeks for a candle.

[IMAGE: side-by-side carrier rate comparison — Royal Mail / DHL / UPS / FedEx]

The US de minimis rule and UK sellers: the $800 exemption ended in 2025

And it got worse in 2025.

The $800 de minimis exemption — which let parcels enter the US duty-free, and which UK businesses used to ship around $5 billion of goods in 2021 alone, about 80% of it through ecommerce⁹ — was removed on 29 August 2025.¹⁰

Now every shipment, regardless of value or origin, is subject to all applicable duties, taxes and fees, and needs a full declaration entry.

So the maths a UK founder runs today looks like this:

£15 shipping. Plus duty. Plus admin. On a £60 order.

And that's the moment the idea dies on the spreadsheet.

👉 See the full carrier-by-carrier cost breakdown here

International shipping to the USA wasn't built for small business

The system wasn't built for you.

Per-parcel international post was designed for a person sending a birthday present to their cousin in Boston. One box. One journey. One trip across the Atlantic.

You're not that person.

You're a business sending forty boxes a month to the same country.

But you're billed as though each one is a stranger travelling alone.

Every parcel pays for its own share of the plane.

That's the whole problem. Not your product. Not your pricing. Not your margin.

You're being charged retail postage for a wholesale problem.

How to ship to US customers cheaply: what the big brands do

They don't post parcels.

They consolidate.

Hundreds of orders get loaded onto one pallet. That pallet crosses the ocean once, at bulk freight rates. It lands, gets broken down, and each parcel finishes its journey on domestic US delivery.

Per-parcel cost collapses.

It's the single reason a big brand can offer free US shipping and a small one can't.

And until recently, there was a hard entry fee to that system: you needed the volume to fill your own pallet. Which meant hundreds of thousands of orders. Which meant waiting.

So the advice small brands got was always the same.

"Get bigger first. Then go international."

Which is backwards. You need the revenue to grow — and you're being told to grow before you can access the revenue.

UK to US shipping for ecommerce, without filling your own pallet

You don't need your own pallet anymore.

You need a share of one.

That's what we built. A group of UK brands' parcels, pooled onto the same consolidated shipment, moving at bulk rates that none of them could reach alone.

7–9 days to the US. Around 20% cheaper than standard international shipping.

No freight forwarder. No customs broker. No minimum order volume. No pallet to fill.

You send your parcels to our UK warehouse. We handle the crossing. Your customer gets their order in the same window an American brand would deliver in.

One monthly subscription instead of a surprise at every checkout.

Is it worth selling to the US from the UK?

Run it on your own numbers.

Take your monthly UK orders. Assume even a small fraction of that volume repeats in a market with a $183 average order value against your £122 UK average.

Then take £15 per parcel off the cost line.

That's not a marketing channel. That's a second revenue stream running on the products you already make, the photos you already have, and the ads you already know how to write.

Expanding a UK business to the USA

A consolidated shipment only works if the pallet works.

Every space on it is finite, and every parcel on it is sharing a rate with the ones beside it. So the brands that get a place are chosen, not queued.

That means specific parcel sizes. Specific weights. UK retailers selling the kind of product that travels well and lands well in an American home.

Tells us what your parcels look like and we'll try to stack them in the shipment.

Sources

Cost per acquisition, UK ecommerce market. IRP Commerce, Ecommerce Market Data. ↩
UK ecommerce average order value, March 2026. IRP Commerce, Ecommerce Market Data. ↩
Average order value by region, citing Dynamic Yield benchmark data. ClickPost, Ecommerce Average Order Value. ↩
Ecommerce as a share of total retail: UK from ONS series J4MC (April 2026), US from the Census Bureau Quarterly Retail E-Commerce Sales (Q1 2026). Compiled by EightX, Ecommerce penetration by market. ↩
Cross-border shopping behaviour among US consumers, citing PPRO. Purolator, Cross-border ecommerce is surging. ↩
Royal Mail International Tracked rates, UK to US. PostGrid, Postage cost from UK to USA. Carrier rates move — check Royal Mail's current price guide before quoting. ↩
Carrier rates for a 1kg parcel, UK to US. TradeWind, How much does it cost to send a parcel to the USA from the UK. ↩
Royal Mail, USA country guide. ↩
British Chambers of Commerce, The End of De Minimis: another Brexit for SME exporters?. ↩
BDO UK, Suspension of de-minimis duty-free imports into the US set to penalise UK exporters; corroborated by DHL, The End of the U.S. De Minimis Rule. ↩