Consignment and thrift store cross-border tax: the honest, short version

US marketplace sales: the platform usually handles US sales tax

Selling to US buyers through Poshmark, eBay, or a similar marketplace does not generally require your shop to register for sales tax in every US state a buyer happens to live in. Most large US marketplaces are marketplace facilitators under state law, meaning the platform itself is legally responsible for calculating, collecting, and remitting the applicable state sales tax on the sale — including sales made by a foreign seller like a Canadian consignment or thrift store. What a marketplace facilitator law actually requires is worth reading once, because it explains why your Poshmark or eBay payout already looks net of a tax you never had to file for yourself.

This does not extend to every channel. A sale made through your own website checkout, rather than through a facilitator marketplace, can put US state sales tax collection back on you directly once your US sales volume into a given state crosses that state's threshold — a genuinely different situation from selling through a marketplace, and worth flagging before you build an independent US-facing storefront.

Selling physical goods to a US buyer is also not the kind of US-source income that triggers 30 percent withholding or requires a W-8BEN. That regime applies to royalties, licensing, and certain services income — not to shipping a used coat to a customer in Ohio — so there is no withholding form to chase down here, which is one less thing to worry about compared with a niche selling digital products or royalties into the US.

Your own GST/HST still follows the export rules

Separately from US sales tax, a sale you physically ship to a customer outside Canada is generally treated as a zero-rated export for GST/HST purposes, meaning you do not charge GST/HST on that sale — but zero-rated is not the same as unreported, and the export needs to be genuinely documented with shipping records showing the item actually left Canada. Whether you charge GST/HST on sales to US customers depends on those same shipping facts, not on who processed the payment.

US import rules on the buyer's side have also been in flux — as at the time of writing, the low-value exemption that once let small parcels enter the US duty-free has been narrowed, and a package worth more than a modest threshold can draw a duty bill at the US border regardless of who shipped it. That is mostly a customer-experience question for you rather than a filing obligation, but it is worth factoring into how you describe international shipping costs to a US buyer before checkout.

US-donated goods are a real but small edge case

Occasionally a US-based donor mails or drops off goods to a Canadian charity thrift store, and two separate questions come up. First, a Canadian registered charity generally cannot issue a US-tax-deductible receipt to a US resident donor without a formal cross-border structure in place — an ordinary Canadian donation receipt has no US tax value on its own. Second, goods physically shipped in from the US as a donation are still a cross-border parcel and can, in principle, draw CBSA attention like any other import, though low-value personal donations rarely attract scrutiny in practice. If US donors or a "friends of" fundraising structure are genuinely part of your plan, that is a deeper conversation than this page covers — our nonprofit cross-border tax page goes into the receipting and structuring side in full.

Most resale shops do not need more than this

Outside marketplace sales to US buyers and the occasional US-sourced donation, a typical consignment or thrift store has no US employees, no US location, and generally no T1135 foreign-reporting obligation unless the corporation happens to hold a US investment account of meaningful size. If your situation goes beyond the ordinary — a US-based owner, plans to open a US location, or a significant cross-border donor base — that changes this analysis, and it is worth a direct conversation rather than generalizing from a page written for the typical shop.

If most of what you sell stays local — a single storefront, a mostly Canadian customer base, occasional online overflow — this is genuinely the whole cross-border file, and treating it as a bigger project than it is wastes time better spent on the sourcing and pricing decisions that actually drive a resale business.