Most enterprise brands eyeing North America go straight for the United States, glance at Canada, and move on. It is a tenth of the size, wrapped in bilingual labelling rules and provincial tax registrations, and it looks like more friction than it is worth. On an episode of MerchantSpring Marketplace Masters, Sebastien Masson, founder of the Canadian agency ListingsManagement.ca and the account-as-a-service model AAAS.ca, argued that this is exactly backwards. Canada is often the smarter place to start, and there is an entry path, the 2P model, that removes most of the friction brands are afraid of. Here is the case, and the mechanics.
The blunt version of Masson's argument: if you cannot make it in Canada, you will not make it in the United States, so why prove the concept in the most expensive, most competitive market first? For a European brand, Canada is cheaper and easier to enter, especially now that US import requirements have tightened. Exporting into Canada avoids the tariffs you face shipping into the US, where you now effectively need a US corporate entity to act as importer of record. And the sequencing compounds: launch in Canada, build traction, then use that traction to enter the US. Go straight to the US and fail, Masson notes, and you will never circle back to Canada.
Canada is roughly a tenth of the US population, and Canadians lean on Amazon a little less, so a US brand might expect around 8% of its sales to come from Canada. The offsetting prize is competition: there is far less of it. For brands weighing North American expansion in general, MerchantSpring's guide on how to sell on Amazon internationally is a useful companion, but the Canada-specific angles are where the real edge sits.
The most underrated reason to sell in Canada is a quirk of consent law. In the US, a shopper can opt out of Amazon's review-request emails. In Canada, they cannot. The practical effect is a much higher review rate per unit sold. Masson's rough numbers: in the US you might sell around 500 units to earn one product review; in Canada it can be closer to 50.
Because Amazon runs the US, Canada and Mexico as a single North America region on one unified account, listing and review activity accrues to the same shared ASIN across those marketplaces (Amazon Global Selling). So the reviews you accumulate quickly and cheaply in Canada help carry the same product in the US. You are not just opening a small market; you are building a review asset at a fraction of the US cost and then spending it where it counts most.
Lower advertising costs are the other draw. Masson says he can drive serious volume at a 15% total ACOS in Canada, a level he doubts is achievable in the US, where ad costs can erode the margin entirely. He knows US million-dollar sellers who make more profit on their Canadian sales than their American ones for exactly that reason. His reframe is worth stealing: don't grow your sales, grow your profits. A market that is 8% of your revenue but 25% of your profit is a very different proposition, and that is before the review traction.
The caveat is honest: this will not last. Masson reckons Canada runs about three years behind the US, so today you can do there what was possible in the US three years ago. As money flows in, competition consolidates and margins thin. His analogy is Amazon momentum: once an ASIN builds positive momentum, it keeps selling on a light feed, but if it stalls, recovering it is “like trying to catch a piano falling from a skyscraper.” The takeaway is to build that momentum now, while entry is cheap, rather than after competitors have bid up the cost of taking share from you.
Two questions define every model: who owns the inventory (and therefore the margins), and whose account does the selling. In 1P, Amazon owns the inventory; you sell to Amazon at a known wholesale margin, and Amazon sets the retail price and owns the upside or downside. In 3P, the brand owns the inventory and margins and sells on its own account, which for a new entrant is often small and unproven. In 2P, a distributor buys your inventory; you know exactly what you make on the sale to them, and they own the margin and sell on their account.
Masson's business runs two flavours of 2P, and the distinction matters. The legacy distributor model means he buys the stock, controls the price (never above the competitive price, never below MAP), and keeps the spread. The account-as-a-service model is a hybrid: the brand keeps ownership of the inventory on consignment and sets its own price, ad spend and target ACOS, while selling through his account rather than its own.
Whatever the operation nets is returned to the brand minus a commission. The point of both is the account itself. Masson's is the tenth-largest seller account in Canada, and when a brand sells alongside him on the same product, he reports winning around 80% of the buy box because his account metrics are stronger. That is the asset a new brand's own account cannot replicate on day one.
The instinctive fear with any 2P arrangement is loss of control, so it helps to name the pieces. Masson splits an Amazon operation into roughly five levers: listings and content, price, inventory management, advertising, and cash flow. Customer data is off the table entirely, because sellers do not get access to it in Canada, so there is no ownership question there.
In the account-as-a-service model, the brand keeps price control and can keep control of its listings, with the agency stepping in on content only where it will lift conversion (their incentive is aligned, since they earn on the sale). Inventory management sits with the agency, which is tuning stock levels precisely to protect account metrics. Sponsored Product ads are run by the account holder by necessity, while Sponsored Brand ads can go either way.
Cash flow stays with the brand, because it is the consequence of everything else. In the legacy distributor model, the main shift is price, which moves to the distributor, always within MAP to protect both the retail channel and the margin. The lesson is that hybrid control is negotiable and should be spelled out lever by lever, not handed over wholesale.
The red tape that scares brands off is narrower than the reputation suggests. You do not need bilingual listings: you write the listing in English and Amazon auto-translates it for French-language shoppers, and A-plus content can be produced in French as well. What Canada does require is bilingual packaging and labelling, English and French with equal prominence, under the Consumer Packaging and Labelling Act (Competition Bureau of Canada).
For European brands already juggling eight or twelve languages, adding two is trivial; for US brands, Masson suggests treating it as a prompt to run English-French for Canada and English-Spanish for the US off the same relabelling project. Some categories, notably grocery, carry extra requirements such as bilingual ingredient lists.
The corporate side is where the 2P model pays for itself. Selling on your own in Canada means a corporation, tax filings, and in some cases GST and sales-tax registration in individual provinces. Under a 2P arrangement, you simply export to your partner, who imports and sells on their own account and absorbs that entire corporate and tax burden.
It is a large part of why legacy brands gravitate to 2P while newer brands often insist on doing it themselves, and, per Masson, why a growing number of the latter come back after breaking an ASIN's momentum trying. For the wider compliance picture across markets, MerchantSpring's global marketplace expansion guide covers the VAT, tax and risk considerations in more depth.
If there is one strategic lesson from Masson's decade in the market, it is that brands are moving away from a single global partner toward the best-in-class operator in each country. No agency is genuinely expert everywhere. With today's tools, the visible work (AI imagery, listing revamps, SEO) is table stakes; anyone can tick those boxes.
What is hard, and what actually drives sales, is an account with the metrics to rank and convert, because being a top seller is itself one of the signals Amazon weighs when it decides what to surface. That is the difference between a listing that is technically perfect and one that sells, and it is the reason the entry path matters as much as the market.
Canada's case rests on profit, not top-line sales, and that only shows up if you can see performance by marketplace and account in one place. MerchantSpring gives sellers, agencies and enterprise brands a unified view across the US, Canada and their other channels, so you can tell whether Canada is 8% of your sales but a far bigger share of your profit, and act on it. See it on your own accounts with a walkthrough of your data.