My customers are 80% mainland Chinese, 20% overseas Chinese. Do I really need a US LLC + Stripe?

If overseas Chinese customers represent 20-25% or more of your total business, the math on a US LLC + Stripe + Mercury starts working. The annual compliance cost (Form 5472, possibly 1040-NR, bookkeeping) is roughly $2,000-$4,000 in CPA fees, plus formation cost. Against that, the alternative for serving 20% of your business via Stripe vs. patchy PayPal or manual Wire transfers is meaningful — both in conversion rate (Visa/Mastercard is the path of least friction for overseas customers) and in operational simplicity.

Below the 20% threshold, several simpler approaches: (1) PayPal for individual orders — limited but works for low volume, (2) manual Wire transfer arrangements for higher-value orders, (3) a small Hong Kong or Singapore entity if you have other reasons to be in those jurisdictions. The trade-off: you'll lose some conversion vs. native Visa/Mastercard checkout, but you avoid the US compliance overhead. Reassess when overseas grows past 25% of business.

Once you do operate via US LLC + Stripe with US customers (including overseas Chinese based in the US), you create some level of US-connection that should be addressed in your tax filings. The standard defensive position is to file Form 5472 + pro-forma 1120 plus a small 1040-NR with ECI from US-customer transactions. For 20% of $250K revenue, the US-customer subset might be $5-15K of net ECI, producing a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars of US tax annually. See [Selling to Overseas Chinese Customers](/articles/overseas-chinese-customers-foreign-llc-stripe) for the full analysis.