Business Type at Signup: The Choice That Decides Everything

Three platforms, three different products, one identical design: the residency requirement is attached to the individual path and not to the entity path.

Stripe

"Unregistered businesses must have a business owner or representative physically located in the US"

"Registered businesses must be registered in the US, even if you operate in another country"

Stripe, Requirements for having a US Stripe account.

Two sentences, two different tests. Unregistered gets a residency test. Registered gets a registration test, which your LLC passes by existing.

Shopify Payments

"Individuals and Sole Proprietorships are required to live in the United States"

Shopify, Bank account and personal information requirements.

Named business types. Not "sellers", not "merchants", not "account holders." Individuals and sole proprietorships. An LLC is neither.

Google Play

This is the sharpest version, because the consequence is a document you either possess or do not.

For an individual developer account, the accepted identity documents are a passport, state identification, driving license, permanent resident card or green card, and all of them must be a "United States government-issued photo ID."

For an organization account's authorized representative, the same document types are accepted, and:

"The government-issued photo ID can be issued in any country"

Google, Google Play Developer Verification: Required documents by country and region.

Same platform, same verification step, same list of document types. One path demands American paper. The other accepts your passport. The only thing that routes you between them is the account type you chose at the beginning.

On Apple, the choice matters for a different reason. Apple's enrollment page states no residency or citizenship requirement at all, but organization enrollment does require a real legal entity:

"Your organization must be a legal entity that can enter into contracts with Apple. We do not accept DBAs, fictitious business names, trade names, or branches."

Apple, Apple Developer Program enrollment. Retrieved September 1, 2026.

Apple also wants a work email on your organization's own domain and a publicly available website whose domain matches. A founder who registered the LLC last week and is using a Gmail address fails both, and neither has anything to do with where they live.

Selecting Business does not clear the path the way it does elsewhere, because PayPal's User Agreement, last updated September 1, 2026, sets both tests in consecutive sentences and never reconciles them.

The business must be "organized in, operating in, or a resident of" the United States, which your LLC satisfies. An individual "must be a resident of the United States or one of its territories," which you do not. Every business account has an individual behind it.

Choose Business anyway, because Personal is unambiguously wrong for a company. Just do not expect the choice to settle the question the way it does on Stripe.

Modesty, speed, timing, and bad forum advice. Four reasons, and none of them is carelessness.

The store is small and "Individual" feels honest. It isn't more honest. If the LLC is the entity earning the money, the LLC is the account holder, and describing yourself as an individual seller misstates who you are.

The individual path is shorter. It skips the D-U-N-S number, the incorporation certificate, the organization address. That's precisely because it's collecting less about an entity that doesn't exist.

Signup happens before the paperwork arrives. You have the LLC but not the EIN letter, so the entity path looks blocked and the individual path looks open. It's worth waiting. Google Play accepts "Any document, notice, or letter either issued by the IRS or stamped by the IRS that states your Organization name," and the CP 575 is exactly that.

Someone in a forum said non-residents can't use the entity path. They can. That advice usually comes from a person who read a residency sentence without noticing what it was scoped to.

Account type is not always a setting you can toggle. On some platforms it is bound to the verified identity and payments profile behind the account, and changing it means a new account, a new verification cycle, and in the worst case a new payments profile with its own country binding.

Get it right at signup. The two seconds you spend on the dropdown are worth more than any other two seconds in the process.

I already signed up as an Individual. What now? Check whether the platform lets you convert. Some do, inside account settings, with a re-verification step. Where it can't be converted, you are usually looking at a fresh account rather than an edit, so find out before you build revenue on the wrong one.

Does selecting Organization mean I need a D-U-N-S number? On Google Play and Apple, yes. D-U-N-S numbers are free from Dun & Bradstreet and take a few days to a couple of weeks. Apple exempts government entities only. Google Play offers an alternative route where Dun & Bradstreet does not operate, available only to organizations genuinely unable to obtain a number.

My LLC has no website yet. Is that a problem? For Apple, yes. It requires a publicly available, functional website on a domain associated with your organization, plus a work email on that domain. Neither is about residency, and both catch new entities.

Which is right if I'm a freelancer with one client? If you formed an LLC and it invoices the client, select the entity option. The size of the business is not what the dropdown is asking about. It's asking who the legal person behind the account is.

Will selecting Organization slow down approval? It asks for more documents, so the form takes longer. Whether approval is slower is not something we have data on, and we are not going to guess. What it does is route you to the verification path that accepts a non-US passport.