Opening a US warehouse as a Canadian brand

The case for US fulfilment is usually made on transit time and sometimes on duty. The real case is more mundane and more compelling: you stop paying entry fees on every single parcel.

What changes when you hold stock in the US

One entry instead of thousands. You import in bulk, pay duty and entry costs once on the shipment, and then ship domestically. Per-parcel brokerage disappears.

Domestic transit and rates. Faster delivery at domestic prices, which affects conversion as well as cost.

A US returns address. Returns stop crossing the border individually, which removes a cost most models forget.

No duty surprises per order. Duty becomes a known cost on an inbound shipment rather than a variable on every sale.

What it adds

Fixed costs: 3PL onboarding and storage, a customs bond, possibly entity setup and ongoing filings.

Working capital: stock sitting in a second country, committed in advance, with the forecasting risk that implies.

Operational complexity: two inventory pools, and the discipline to keep them balanced.

Finding the break-even

Start with your current cost per US order: duty, brokerage, outbound freight, and the real cost of handling a US return today.

Then model the alternative: duty on bulk inbound, inbound freight, storage and pick-pack per order, domestic outbound, plus the fixed costs annualised.

The crossover is where the fixed costs are covered by the per-order saving. Multiply the per-order saving by your monthly volume and compare against monthly fixed cost. That is the whole calculation, and it is usually decisive in one direction.

Do the cheap things first

Before committing stock to another country, verify that your CUSMA claims are succeeding and your classifications are correct. If qualifying goods are being charged duty today, your current cost baseline is inflated and your break-even analysis will be wrong.

Fixing the paperwork sometimes defers the warehouse decision by a year, which is a good outcome. When it does not, you now have a clean baseline to model against — which is where IORready starts.