LLC, EIN, bank account: one single process

A US company is not a legal requirement for selling on Amazon.com. Amazon also accepts individual accounts with a Turkish address and a Turkish tax ID. Even so, most sellers who aim to scale form a US company within their first twelve months, because the cost of continuing as an individual shows up separately at every layer of the operation.

The first reason is liability protection. An LLC separates the company's debts and obligations from your personal assets. In a market where product liability claims reach serious figures, that separation is not a theoretical detail. The second reason is payment infrastructure: solutions like Mercury, Relay, Wise Business and Payoneer, plus direct access to US cards through Stripe, generally require a US legal entity and an EIN. The third reason is the supplier and logistics side; prep centers, 3PLs and freight forwarders inside the US prefer to contract with a US company, and some will only work that way.

The fourth reason is brand protection. Trademark registration through the USPTO and the subsequent Amazon Brand Registry enrollment run more cleanly on the operational side when handled through a US company. A caveat is needed here: having formed a company in the US does not remove the USPTO's attorney requirement. What matters is where the company's principal office sits; if your company is managed from Turkey, you count as a foreign domiciled applicant before the USPTO and you must file your trademark application through a US licensed trademark attorney. This point varies by individual and by the company's actual center of management, and there is no one size fits all answer.

The fifth reason is exit and growth scenarios. When you want to sell your Amazon business, raise investment or talk to an aggregator, the first thing the buyer side looks at is a clean legal entity, orderly books and a transferable seller account. Building that structure after the fact is always more expensive than building it correctly from day one.

For the vast majority of Amazon FBA sellers the answer is the LLC. An LLC can be set up so that it pays no tax of its own at the federal level; profit flows directly onto the owner's return and the double taxation seen with a C-Corp does not arise. Formation costs are low, corporate formalities such as boards and meeting minutes are minimal, and ownership stakes can be arranged flexibly.

An LLC's tax classification depends on the number of owners. A single-member LLC is generally treated at the federal level as a disregarded entity, meaning a pass-through. A multi-member LLC is taxed by default like a partnership and files Form 1065. This distinction directly determines which forms you will file later, so it should be settled at formation.

On the Corporation side there are two options. A C-Corp is subject to a flat federal corporate tax rate, and a second layer of tax arises when profit is distributed. On the other hand, if you plan to take on investors, grant stock options or build a multi-owner corporate structure, the standard vehicle is the C-Corp; the venture capital ecosystem is built around it. The S-Corp comes with a critical restriction: S-Corp owners must be US citizens or US tax residents. An entrepreneur residing in Turkey cannot be an S-Corp owner. For that reason the S-Corp is practically off the table for Turkey based Amazon sellers.

The practical test when deciding is this: if your annual revenue is mid-sized, you have one or two owners and no outside investment plans, an LLC is enough. If you are planning institutional investment, a complex multi-owner cap table or hiring a team in the US, the C-Corp comes into play. Mentoreis settles this decision before formation together with your revenue projection and ownership structure; changing the wrong structure later is possible, but it can carry tax consequences.

For a seller starting from zero, the realistic time from US company formation to Amazon seller account approval is generally between 4 and 10 weeks. The most uncertain item in that window is the EIN; company formation takes a few days while the EIN can take weeks.

The process runs in this order. First the structure and state are decided, name availability is checked and two alternatives are chosen. Then the Articles of Organization are filed with the state; standard processing takes 1 to 10 business days depending on the state, and in most states 24 hour expedited processing is available for an additional fee. Registered Agent appointment happens at the same time as formation, because every state requires the company to have an address in that state open to service of process. Once formation is approved the Operating Agreement is prepared; even for single-owner companies, banks and Amazon may ask for this document.

The EIN application is the critical step in the process. Foreign applicants without a US Social Security Number (SSN) or an ITIN cannot use the IRS online EIN system. The application is made on Form SS-4 by fax or mail; a phone application channel is also available for international applicants. The timelines published by the IRS are as follows: generally 4 business days on the fax channel and roughly 4 weeks by mail. On the phone channel open to international applicants, the EIN is assigned immediately during the call. In practice these timelines can stretch depending on IRS workload, so the bank and Amazon account schedule has to be built around the EIN. The EIN application is free with the IRS; intermediaries only charge a service fee.

Once the EIN arrives the bank account is opened, and then the Amazon seller account is set up. On Amazon's side, filling in the registration form takes half a day; the real time is spent on identity and address verification, and including the video call appointment this stage typically completes in 1 to 4 weeks. If an ITIN is required, a separate application is filed on Form W-7 and that process generally takes 2 to 4 months; keeping the ITIN off the critical path of formation matters, so the process is not stretched unnecessarily.

The document set required to form a US company is surprisingly simple compared with forming a company in Turkey. No stack of notarized paperwork, no apostille and no capital blocking letter is needed. What stretches the process is not the number of documents but the inconsistencies within them.

For formation, the identity page of your passport, a valid residential address and a current document verifying that address are enough. As proof of address, a bank statement from the last three months or an electricity, water, natural gas or internet bill is generally accepted. The name and address spelling on that document must match, letter for letter, the spelling used in the company record and in the bank application. Consistency in converting Turkish characters to their English equivalents is the most common source of verification problems that surface later.

Alongside these, information about your business is requested: the NAICS code that describes your field of activity, estimated annual revenue, the ownership split among partners and the contact details to be used for the company. Rather than picking the NAICS code at random, it is important to align it with your actual activity, because this code is used as a reference both in bank risk assessment and in certain state licensing obligations.

At the Amazon seller account stage the following are additionally required: company formation documents, the EIN confirmation letter, a valid credit card that accepts international payments, a bank account opened in the company's name and a video call verifying the seller's identity. Which form you provide in the Amazon tax interview is one of the most commonly misunderstood topics. What matters is not where the company was formed but the owner's tax residency. A single-member US LLC (a disregarded entity) owned by a person who is a tax resident of Turkey cannot provide a W-9 even though it was formed in the US; under IRS rules a W-8BEN must be provided in the name of the owner, not the company. In multi-member structures and in corporate ownership, the W-8BEN-E comes into play. Providing the wrong form leads to withholding and to an account record that is troublesome to correct afterward. Rather than filling in this step by guesswork, it should be settled according to your structure.

The step that most often gets stuck in US company formation is the bank account, and the reason is usually not a missing document but the application failing risk assessment. Your company can be formed in a day, your EIN can arrive, and your account application can still be rejected. That is why the banking step has to be planned from the very beginning.

In practice there are two paths. The first is fintech solutions: platforms like Mercury, Relay, Wise Business and Payoneer allow remote applications, and approval generally takes between 1 and 10 business days. The technical detail worth knowing here is that most of these platforms are not banks themselves; they hold deposits at partner banks. That matters for account closure policies, insurance coverage and country based restrictions. Fintech firms' policies on which countries' founders they will work with can change over time, so it is wise not to depend on a single platform.

The address question is decisive here. Mercury states plainly in its own policy that it does not accept mailbox or virtual office addresses and makes no exception to that rule; registered agent addresses fall in the same category. Most sellers forming companies from Turkey get stuck at exactly this point, because the only US address they have is the registered agent address. Mentoreis provides its clients with a genuine commercial address through our own office in New Jersey; not a virtual office, but the physical address where we operate. That is the real reason we put New Jersey forward in company formation.

The second path is traditional banks. Opening an account at institutions like Chase and Bank of America generally requires a physical branch visit in the US, some branches ask for an SSN or ITIN, and practice varies enormously from branch to branch. If you have no plans to travel to the US, do not make this your primary plan.

Most rejection reasons are predictable and preventable. The most common ones: the company name not matching the spelling on the EIN letter exactly, using a virtual office or mailbox address, describing the business model vaguely in the application, many company applications having been filed from the same address, and high revenue being declared for a company with no website. Mentoreis opens the bank application only after running it through a document consistency check, and in the event of a rejection directs you to an alternative platform.

Across more than 1,500 formations, nearly all of the recurring mistakes could have been prevented by simple decisions made before the process started. The most expensive ones are below.

The most critical mistake is forming the company and ignoring the tax side. A single-member LLC with a foreign owner continues to have a Form 5472 obligation even if the company makes no sales at all, and the penalty for failing to file that form sits at $25,000 per form. Sellers who only have the company formed and never set up accounting usually find out they have been living with that risk in year two.

Second comes document inconsistency. Differences in name spelling, address format and company title across the formation document, EIN letter, bank application and Amazon account stretch verification processes by weeks. Third is picking a state you have no connection to purely for low cost and then setting up a physical operation in the US; in that case foreign qualification registration is required in the second state and the cost advantage disappears.

Other recurring mistakes include mixing company money and personal money in the same account, missing the registered agent renewal and losing good standing, trying to open an Amazon account before the EIN arrives, and completing the Amazon tax interview in a way that does not match your structure. That last item is especially insidious; the wrong form choice causes no trouble at account opening but leaves an inconsistency on the filing side at year end that has to be corrected.