I believe that shipping container costs are back down to around $2,200 for a 40 ft container. In Jan. 2019, the same container cost $1,900, peak was around $11,000 in mid 2022.
My understanding is that prices for higher volume commodities being shipped to the US are falling again. For bicycle parts, in the USA, there is a growing glut of parts/bicycles where importers paid very high prices to get the parts sent here, and now they are sitting on a lot of bike parts where they have too much money invested. Thus they are trying to keep sale prices higher as long as they can to try to recover their investments. This will probably balance out, as competing importers bring in new parts a lower costs, forcing others to reduce prices and get rid of their inventory.
For us, who like to purchase bike parts directly from China for our personal usage, Chinese stores monitor our prices here, and raise and lower their prices, because like us, they want the largest profit they can make.
I see this every year on Aliexpress, January through May they try to raise prices and see what sticks. Then they have their summer sales. Then prices go up some until around Nov. Dec. when they have their supposed end of year sales.
