The phone calls come in waves. A founder of a successful D2C brand calls — from Bengaluru, Mumbai, or a smaller city you have never heard of. The pitch is always the same. They have just had a breakout year on Amazon India. The numbers are good. The team is confident. They want to go global. “We have cracked India,” they tell me. “Let us just replicate it in the US.”
I have learned to listen patiently, because the assumption underneath that sentence is the most expensive one in Indian e-commerce. Going global on Amazon is not a replication exercise. It is, in many ways, building a new business from scratch — on a different planet.
Four things change the day you list in the US. The first is the math — international FBA fees, customs, returns logistics, currency conversion and US warehousing compound in ways that look small in spreadsheets but matter enormously in practice; a product earning a 15 percent margin in India can land at minus five in the US even before advertising begins. The second is social proof — Indian shoppers buy on price and brand familiarity, but American shoppers buy almost entirely on what other Americans have said about a product, and accumulating that proof at scale is harder, slower and more regulated than most Indian sellers expect. The third is competitive density — your category may be ten times more crowded in the US, with well-funded American brands that have entire teams dedicated to Amazon. The fourth is Q4 — almost everything in the US is concentrated into four weeks between Black Friday and December, and a single bad festive season can take a year to recover from.
A founder I worked with closely had built one of the cleanest D2C operations I have seen in India — excellent product, lean catalogue, healthy ad efficiency, a loyal customer base. He was confident going into the US, perhaps overconfident. We pushed back. We said: spend three months getting your Amazon India business export-ready before listing a single product in the US.
That meant three things. First, getting unit economics so tight that even an FBA fee in dollars would not break them. Second, building a brand asset library — listings, A-plus content, brand store — that could scale internationally without losing voice. Third, raising a small dedicated capital pool for the US launch, separate from his India operations.
When he eventually launched in the US six months later, the first 90 days were not painless. But by month four, he had crossed break-even. Almost every founder I have seen launch in a hurry is still trying to recover their initial investment a year later.
The global Amazon ecosystem is harder than ever. Ad costs are higher. Compliance is tighter. The bar for listings, brand assets and customer experience has risen sharply. The market rewards brands that arrive prepared and punishes those that treat international expansion as an extension of an India playbook.
The simplest question I ask every founder considering global is this: would your business be okay if your first three months in the US were a complete loss? If yes, you might be ready. If no, you are not preparing — you are gambling.
Going global on Amazon is one of the most valuable things an Indian brand can do this decade. Done well, it transforms a domestic brand into a global one. Done poorly, it can wipe out three years of profitable growth in India in months. The brands that succeed are not the ones with the most ambition — they are the ones who treat the marketplace across the border with the seriousness it deserves.
Rajeshkumar is the Founder of Thrise, an Amazon Ads Verified Partner and full-stack growth agency based in Chennai that helps brands scale on Amazon India and across global marketplaces including the US, UK and UAE. Learn more about Thrise's Amazon Global Account Management services or write to hello@thrise.agency.
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