We have run our Amazon business from a beach town in Costa Rica for years. Not as an experiment, as the normal way the business operates. So when someone asks whether you can really run an Amazon business from another country, I can answer from experience: yes, and the parts that break are never the ones people worry about.
Nobody gives up because they could not check sales from a beach. They give up because a bank flagged a login from a new country, or a shipment sat at a prep center that nobody was watching. Here is the honest version of how it works.
Why this works at all
FBA does the physical work. Amazon stores your inventory, picks and packs every order, ships it, and handles most returns. What is left for you is decision work: what to reorder, how to price, which products to kill, what the numbers are telling you. Every one of those jobs happens on a screen, and a screen works the same in Costa Rica as it does in Toronto or Texas.
That is the whole trick. If your current model requires touching product in your garage, you do not have a remote business yet. Fix that before you book anything.
The five things that actually change when you leave
1. Inventory can never touch your hands. Suppliers ship to a prep center, and the prep center ships to Amazon. You see inspection photos instead of boxes. This is the biggest operational shift, and it is worth running for a few months before you move, while problems are still cheap to fix.
2. Banking gets fragile. Keep every home-country bank account and credit card open before you go, because opening new ones from abroad ranges from painful to impossible. Tell your banks you travel. A frozen disbursement account will ruin a month faster than any Amazon problem. Always have a backup and then a backup! Same with credit cards.
3. Time zones flip from enemy to asset. Amazon does not care when you work. Suppliers do. From Central America, an email sent to China in my evening lands at the start of their workday, and the answer is waiting with my coffee.
4. Internet needs a backup. One connection is zero connections. We run fiber with a phone hotspot behind it, and the Seller Central app covers true emergencies. You need enough redundancy to fix a suppressed listing the hour it happens, not when the cafe wifi comes back. Our house we have local fiber and Starlink for backup.
5. Your address becomes a project. Seller verification, bank statements, and the odd government letter all still expect you to exist somewhere. A virtual mailbox solves most of it but not all. The rule that matters: keep your identity, address, and bank details in Seller Central accurate. Accounts get suspended over stale, mismatched information, not over living abroad.
What a normal week Could look like
Mornings start with ten minutes on yesterday's numbers: sales, ad spend, anything that lost the Buy Box overnight. Two or three mornings a week that stretches to half an hour for repricing and PPC changes. Restock math happens once a week on a spreadsheet, supplier and prep center emails go out in batches, and the books get closed monthly. The physical business runs itself between decisions.
The Canadian version, since that is us
Running Amazon.ca and Amazon.com from abroad adds a cross-border layer that US-only sellers never think about. Disbursements arrive in two currencies, and how you convert them quietly decides a point or two of margin; we covered the mechanics in our
currency exchange guide. Margins on .ca run thinner, so know your
full Amazon fee stack for 2026 before you commit inventory. And your goods still cross borders without you; the
freight forwarding and import GST basics matter more once you cannot drive to the warehouse.
One warning on tax. A long trip changes nothing, but actually moving out of Canada can change your tax residency, and that is a planning project, not a blog paragraph. Our accounting firm, Jones & Cosman,
works with cross-border Amazon sellers on exactly this, ideally a year before the flight.
Frequently asked questions
Can I run Amazon FBA while traveling?
Yes. On trips under a couple of months you will barely notice a difference. The one thing to set up before you leave: two-step verification through an authenticator app instead of SMS. A login code sent to a SIM card sitting in a drawer at home strands more traveling sellers than anything else.
How do I manage FBA remotely day to day?
The Seller Central app for alerts, a profit dashboard so you see real margin daily, and a repricer doing the minute-to-minute work. Once volume justifies it, a virtual assistant takes customer messages.
Can I be an Amazon seller while living abroad permanently?
Yes. Amazon accepts sellers residing in dozens of countries. What Amazon requires is that the information on file matches reality, so update your country of residence and re-verify when you make the move permanent.
What is the hardest part?
Sourcing. Retail arbitrage dies the day you leave, because it needs you in stores. Wholesale and private label travel well because those products never touch your house. If your sourcing model survives the move, everything else on this page is solvable.
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