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Compliance

LICENSES AND
PERMITS.

Reference

Some categories cannot be sold without a license, and the license is usually needed by more than one party in the chain. The unglamorous one that catches everybody first is the seller's permit — required to sell at all in most US states, and required to issue a resale certificate to your own suppliers.

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What to know
Start with the permit that lets you trade
A state seller's permit is free or nearly free, and selling without one is a penalty in most states even if you collected no tax. It is also what lets you buy inventory tax-free, so operating without one costs money on both sides.
Categories that need more
Each of these carries its own licensing regime, usually at more than one level of government, and usually for more than one party in the chain.
  • Alcohol — federal, state and often local, with separate tiers
  • Tobacco and nicotine — licensed at nearly every level
  • Firearms and ammunition — heavily restricted at every step
  • Pharmaceuticals and controlled substances
  • Food service and manufacturing facility permits
Licenses are usually not transferable
Buying a business does not transfer its licenses in most regimes; they are re-applied for. Transactions have collapsed over this, discovered late, when the license was the actual asset.
They expire and they are audited
Renewal dates rarely align with anything else in the business, and lapsing typically means stopping sales rather than paying a fine. Recording the dates somewhere that warns you is the entire discipline.
Where to go next
COMPLIANCE
In your account — sign in and it opens on your own figures.
Open
CERTIFICATIONS AND WHAT THEY UNLOCK.
A certification is a third party attesting to something a buyer cannot verify themselves.
Read it
THE PAPERWORK THAT UNBLOCKS SALES.
Compliance in wholesale is not a department — it is a set of documents a buyer asks for at the exact moment they are ready to order.
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GRAJ

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RUN YOUR GAME ON GRAJ.

Free to join. Participants keep 95% of every transaction; GRAJ takes 5%. Built for 195 countries — payments live in the United States.

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