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Managing Shipping Cost Increases in a Volatile Transport Market
How do your landed costs look in an ongoing ocean freight crisis? For a lot of buyers, the answer is “steep.”
More worrying, the price you pay today might be the lowest you see for a while. Capacity constraints, fuel costs, and geopolitical disruption continue to push rates upward and establish a higher freight-cost floor.
That doesn’t make you powerless against the crisis, however. Freight exposure is a sourcing issue before it becomes a shipping one. When clients approach current conditions with that mindset, they can often avoid expenses other companies accept as unavoidable. Here are the answers I give most often, along with strategies you can use to rethink freight spending now.
Will Ocean Freight Rates Come Back Down?
Yes, but probably not soon, and maybe never all the way back. Many of the pressures behind today’s increases are structural, and the current market rewards companies that respond to the conditions in front of them.
Some of the uncertainty will pass. Fuel costs and seasonal demand surges will continue to fluctuate. I expect carrier capacity management, prolonged rerouting, and container and equipment imbalances to be harder to unwind. Together, these pressures create expenses buyers cannot afford to simply wait out.
Rates ease when routes normalize, demand softens, or carriers start competing on price instead of managing capacity. Each outcome is possible, but none happens quickly enough to serve as a freight strategy.
How Can I Mitigate My Ocean Freight Costs Now Instead of Trying to Ride It Out?
By making the changes that make sense now, before your own constraints and the broader market narrow your options. In almost all cases, clients who come to me before an order is under pressure have more viable options available.
Every company enters the same freight market with a different level of exposure. Sourcing geography, supplier redundancy, and volume leverage shape much of that difference, putting several important decisions within reach early.
In a volatile freight market, the most useful decisions give your company:
- More Options: Global schedule reliability fell to 59% in February 2026, its lowest point since April 2025, according to Sea-Intelligence. When schedules become less reliable, alternate routing becomes especially valuable. Keep multiple carriers, forwarders, and lanes vetted ahead of time so a bumped container has somewhere to go.
- More Time/More Runway: Drewry expected 39 blank sailings across major East-West trades from July 20 through August 23, representing a 5% cancellation rate. Even at that level, a sailing you expected to use can disappear before you book it. Acting earlier gives your company room to secure another sailing or adjust before lost time turns into premium freight.
- More Flexibility: The fewer places you can produce a part, the more exposure you place on a single supplier and shipping lane. Adding qualified secondary sources reduces that dependence, so one disruption cannot dictate the cost or timing of the entire order.
How Much of an Ocean Freight Cost Increase Should Land on the Buyer?
Not all the charges, and nothing that can’t be explained and justified. There is a major difference between a supplier who takes the first available quote and forwards the bill, and one who compares forwarders, evaluates alternate routes, books earlier when possible, and maintains qualified secondary sources.
What did your suppliers try before passing along the increase? Does the new price hold through the quarter? What happens to the surcharges when rates ease? With continued volatility likely, it is worth getting the answers to questions like these before the next increase. At minimum, what you learn should give procurement a firmer basis for forecasting landed costs and evaluating supplier performance.
