Going Global & Cross-Border — Selling Your Product Abroad

"First-leg" is the first stretch of the journey — getting goods from the factory (usually in Taiwan or China) to the Amazon warehouse — covering export clearance, ocean or air freight, US customs clearance, and finally delivery into the Amazon warehouse. The "last leg," from the Amazon warehouse to the buyer's hands, is the part Amazon handles.

It differs from regular import/export in three big ways:

• The receiver is extremely picky. In normal business, when goods reach a customer's warehouse, a slightly dented box or an off-spec pallet usually slides. Not with Amazon: a mislabeled tag, an overweight box, or a non-compliant pallet gets rejected outright — and they won't help you fix it.
• Amazon takes on none of the import responsibility for you. Clearance, duty, and compliance documents are all the seller's job (see the previous question).
• The time pressure is different. If a regular shipment runs a few days late, you absorb it. But run out of FBA stock and your listing's rank drops — meaning the ad spend you poured in earlier goes down the drain. So FBA sellers care more about certainty of timing than about shaving a little off freight.

A simple analogy: regular import/export is like dropping goods at a friend's house; FBA first-leg is like sending them through airport customs — every rule is hard and fixed.

An easy way to picture it: listing on a marketplace (Amazon, cross-border Shopee) is like renting a counter inside a department store; building your own site (say, on Shopify) is like leasing your own storefront and opening shop.

The upside of the department-store counter is that the store brings its own foot traffic — people can see you on day one. The price is that you play by the store's rules: commissions (Amazon, with storage and ads, often eats 30–40%), rules that can change overnight, and customers who belong to the store, not you. Get pulled from the listing one day and your business drops to zero instantly.

Your own storefront, on the other hand, is fully your own — you keep the full margin, and the customer list is yours. But no one walks past your door automatically — every customer has to be bought in with ad spend, and the early burn is real.

In practice, the path most Taiwanese sellers take is: list on a marketplace first to validate whether anyone in that market actually buys this product, because a marketplace is the cheapest place to test and fail. Once order volume is steady and you're sure the product can win, build your own site and gradually pull repeat customers over, shaking off marketplace commissions. The ones who bet heavily on their own site from day one usually already have brand recognition or social traffic.

It's not a one-or-the-other matter of faith — it's a matter of stage: borrow traffic first, then grow your own.

First: is the margin fat enough. Once you export, every order carries extra international freight, duty, marketplace commission, and overseas marketing cost. Roughly, these together often eat 40–50% of the selling price. Example: an item that sells for NT$500 in Taiwan with NT$150 of margin — shipped overseas, freight and commission alone top NT$150. You lose money on every unit sold. The general rule of thumb is you need a margin of at least 60%, or a price point you can push up, to have the headroom to export. Products that are light, small, hard to break, and high-priced (jewelry, 3C accessories, skincare) have a built-in advantage; heavy, cheap ones (bottled drinks, ceramic dishware) are at a built-in disadvantage.

Second: can it pass compliance. Food, supplements, cosmetics, and electricals with a battery or wireless function each face their own certification gates in every country, and for some categories the testing fees alone start in the hundreds of thousands of NT dollars. Get clear on the target market's rules for your category before you decide whether to play.

Third: does anyone there actually want it. A hit in Taiwan doesn't mean there's demand abroad. The simplest down-to-earth method: search your category on that country's Amazon or main e-commerce site, look at what the top 20 sell for and what the reviews complain about — if they're selling below even your cost, or the market is flooded by big brands, think hard about what edge you have to win.

Clear all three gates, then talk about exporting; if one gate is blocked, solve that one first.

In recent years, with the tariff wars and supply-chain shifts, the government has put real weight behind grants for "diversifying markets." There are a few main types right now (the details change year to year, so always go by that year's official announcement before applying):

The International Trade Administration, Ministry of Economic Affairs, "Grant for Building Overseas Sales Channels" — this is the one most directly aimed at "wanting to go global," subsidizing your build-out of overseas marketing channels: local e-commerce listings, overseas warehouses, setting up local agents, and digital marketing can all fall within scope (pure trade-show participation and sales missions don't count). The 2026 (ROC year 115) round opened for applications mid-year.

The Industrial Development Administration, Ministry of Economic Affairs, "Case-by-Case Grant for Overseas Market Deployment" — aimed at manufacturers with factory registration and a track record of export performance, subsidizing R&D and the opening of new markets, with larger per-case funding, suited to factory-type firms that make their own products.

Local-government brand and market-expansion grants — for example Taipei City's industrial development incentives (SITI) and the like, smaller in amount but with a lower bar too, good for getting your feet wet.

The common eligibility bar is roughly: the company is properly registered, has no outstanding taxes, and no record of defaulting on a government program — then you have to write a proposal setting out which market you're going to, what you'll do, how much you'll spend, and how much export you expect to bring back.

Three things anyone who's been through it will warn you about: ① grants are mostly "spend first, get reimbursed later," not a lump sum handed to you up front, so your company's cash flow has to hold up; ② the government covers at most around half, and you fund the matching share yourself; ③ take a grant and you're on the hook for KPIs and a closeout report — the admin work isn't light. So the right mindset is: you were going to export anyway, and applying for a grant just speeds it up — not exporting for the sake of the grant.

First, what China+1 actually is: it's not telling you to pull out of China, but "keep doing China, and add one more production backup outside it (commonly Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, India)," to spread tariff and geopolitical risk — the US taxes Chinese goods heavily, and goods shipped out of Vietnam aren't in the same tariff basket.

But whether to follow really isn't for every company. Worth moving: firms with a high share of exports to the US, hit hardest by tariffs, with order volume big enough to support a second base. Don't rush: firms with small order volume, heavy product molds, or a supply chain (raw materials, components, skilled hands) deeply rooted in China — force the move and you often end up with "the factory relocated, but the materials still have to ship over from China," saving on duty and losing it on freight and time.

And moving out carries a lot of hidden costs that anyone who's done it knows: at a new plant, the yield ramp takes at least half a year to get going, you have to station managers on-site long-term, and you have to relearn the local regulations and labor culture from scratch. Plenty of Taiwanese firms lose money their first year in Vietnam — only those who tough it out start to see a return.

The more pragmatic approach is to phase it: move just the final assembly stage out first (which shifts the country-of-origin determination), keeping the core components as they are; once that runs smoothly, assess whether to move more processes over. Save the all-in-one-go gamble for the deep-pocketed big firms.