GST registration for foreign companies and non-residents in Australia: simplified vs standard, and the GST you can actually get back

If you sell into Australia from overseas, there is one decision that matters more than any other, and most sellers make it by accident: which kind of GST registration you hold. Get it right and the 10% you pay at the Australian border is recoverable. Get it wrong and it is simply a cost — permanently.

This guide covers registration for non-residents across every channel: your own website, Shopify, eBay, marketplaces, and digital products and services. It is deliberately not Amazon-specific.

(General information only, current at August 2026. Confirm your own position before acting.)

The distinction that decides everything

Australia offers non-residents two entirely different registrations, and they are not upgrades of each other.

	Simplified GST registration	Standard GST registration
Identifier issued	ARN	ABN
Australian identity documents	Not required	Required
Speed	Fast, fully online	Slower — identity verification
Claim GST credits	No	Yes
Recover GST paid at the border	No	Yes (if you are the importer)
Appear on ABN Lookup	No	Yes

Simplified registration exists to make it easy for offshore businesses to collect and remit GST on sales to Australian consumers. It was never designed to give anything back. That is the trade: minimal paperwork, zero recovery.

The practical rule: if you never pay Australian GST yourself — you sell digital products, services, or goods that ship directly to customers under A$1,000 — simplified registration may be entirely adequate. If you import stock into Australia, simplified registration is usually the wrong choice, because it locks you out of recovering the border GST. Note that the standard path is the one that needs an ABN, and the ABN application carries a hard 43-day identity-document deadline that refuses far more applications than the entitlement test does — the document set, the real timeline and the failure patterns.

When do you actually have to register?

Registration may be required once your GST turnover from sales connected with Australia reaches A$75,000 in any 12-month period.

Two things are commonly misread here.

It is your Australian-connected sales, not your worldwide revenue. A business turning over millions globally with A$40,000 of Australian sales may be under the threshold. The reverse also holds.

The test looks forward as well as back. It is not only “have I passed A$75,000 in the last 12 months” but also “am I likely to in the next 12”. A business scaling quickly can be required to register before its historic figures show the threshold at all.

What “connected with Australia” means

This is the phrase that determines whether Australian GST touches your sale. For non-residents it usually arises in one of three ways.

1. Goods you bring into Australia. If you import stock and sell it from within Australia — a fulfilment centre, a 3PL, a warehouse — those sales are connected with Australia. This is the category where standard registration usually pays for itself.

2. Low value imported goods (A$1,000 or less). Since 1 July 2018, GST applies to consumer sales of low value goods shipped from overseas to Australian consumers. Responsibility for collecting it falls on the supplier, the electronic distribution platform, or the redeliverer — depending on how the sale is structured.

3. Imported services and digital products. Since 1 July 2017, streaming, software, e-books, online courses, design work and similar supplies to Australian consumers can carry GST. Sales to Australian businesses that are GST-registered are generally treated differently — which is why collecting a customer’s ABN matters.

Note what is missing from that list: goods over A$1,000 sent directly to a customer. GST on those is generally collected at the border from the importer, not by you at checkout.

When the marketplace is liable instead of you

If you sell through an electronic distribution platform, the platform may be treated as the supplier for GST purposes on certain sales made through it — and is then liable for the GST rather than you.

This causes two opposite mistakes, both expensive:

• Assuming the platform covers everything. It generally does not cover sales through your own website, and it does not deal with GST you pay importing your own stock. Sellers with mixed channels routinely find one channel handled and the rest exposed.
• Charging GST twice. Some sellers add GST on top of platform sales where the platform is already remitting it.

If you sell across multiple channels, map them individually. There is rarely one answer that covers the whole business.

For Amazon specifically, the line falls between low value goods shipped from overseas and sales out of an Australian fulfilment centre — only the first is Amazon’s to remit. Does Amazon collect GST for me on Australian sales? walks through both sides of that line.

Getting the border GST back — the part most sellers miss

When goods over A$1,000 enter Australia, 10% GST is payable at the border. For an importer bringing in A$300,000 of stock a year, that is around A$30,000 passing through customs.

To recover it, two conditions generally both have to hold:

1. You hold standard GST registration (simplified cannot claim credits), and
2. You are the importer of record on the customs entry.

The second condition trips up more sellers than the first. If your freight forwarder, 3PL or supplier is named as importer, the GST is theirs to claim and not yours — regardless of who paid for the goods. It is worth checking your customs documentation before assuming the credit is available.

For businesses importing regularly, the deferred GST scheme may allow the GST to be deferred to your BAS rather than paid at the border, which removes the cash-flow gap entirely. It has eligibility conditions, including holding standard registration and lodging monthly.

Do you need an Australian company?

Usually not. A foreign company can register for GST and hold an ABN in its own right. Incorporating an Australian subsidiary is a separate decision with its own tax and compliance consequences, and it is rarely required simply to sell into the market.

Where an Australian entity genuinely helps is a different conversation — local banking, local employment, customer perception, or a structure built for eventual sale.

The provisions behind that answer — the ABN Act section that entitles an offshore enterprise to an ABN, and why the resident-director rule does not reach you — are set out in Do I need an Australian company to sell on Amazon Australia?.

Why applications stall: identity

The forms are not the hard part. Proving who you are is.

Non-resident applicants must satisfy the ATO’s identity requirements, and this is where most applications are delayed or rejected — certified documents, officeholder identification, and evidence of the entity’s existence in its home jurisdiction. Assembling that evidence correctly at the start is generally the difference between registration in weeks and months of correspondence.

After registration

Once registered, GST becomes an ongoing cycle rather than a one-off task:

• Lodge your BAS on the cycle assigned to you — usually quarterly, monthly for larger turnover or deferred-GST participants
• Charge GST correctly on connected sales, and keep it out of sales that aren’t
• Keep evidence for GST credits, including customs entries and supplier tax invoices
• Watch your channel mix — adding a warehouse, a marketplace or a direct-to-consumer site can change the analysis

The mistakes that cost the most

1. Simplified registration while importing stock — the single most expensive default, because every dollar of border GST becomes unrecoverable.
2. Not being the importer of record — a paperwork detail that quietly gives away the credit.
3. Registering late — the ATO can backdate registration to when you were required to register, creating GST liability on sales where you never collected it.
4. Assuming the marketplace handles it all — true for some sales, rarely for all of them.
5. Ignoring income tax entirely — GST registration is not the whole picture. Whether you have an Australian permanent establishment for income tax is a separate question, and the answer is not automatic just because stock sits in a warehouse here. Registering for GST does not, by itself, create a lodgment obligation either — but “no return” should be a documented position rather than silence: see do non-resident sellers lodge an Australian income tax return?

Registering from overseas: what the application involves

The registration is lodged from wherever you are — no visit, no local entity, no Australian address. What decides the timeline is the identity evidence behind it: non-resident applications are processed manually, and certified documents must be assembled to the ATO’s standards inside a fixed window. The full document set, the certification rules by country and the failure patterns are in how to get an ABN as a non-resident; the entity-type decision behind it — your existing company, an Australian subsidiary, or an ASIC-registered branch — is in ABN registration for foreign companies.

Two ways to run it. Lodging directly with the ATO yourself is one option. The easier path is an experienced registered tax agent who prepares the certified set to the standard the ATO actually applies, chooses the registration type deliberately rather than by default, answers ATO queries from the Australian side of the time zone, and sets up the BAS cycle so border GST starts coming back from the first quarter. Start your ABN & GST application online — about ten minutes, scoping questions only, no documents or payment at the application stage.

What to do next

Work out, in order: which of your sales are connected with Australia; whether you are at or approaching A$75,000 of those; whether you import goods yourself; and who is named as importer on your customs entries. Those four answers determine the registration you need — and whether you have been leaving 10% at the border. When you have them — or would rather a registered tax agent confirm them for you — you can apply for your ABN and GST registration online; the application asks scoping questions only, with identity documents handled later through a secure channel.

General information only, current at August 2026. It does not take your circumstances into account. GST outcomes for non-residents turn on the specific facts of your supply chain and sales channels, and rates and rules can change. Confirm your position with a registered tax agent before acting.