Ocean shipping costs are insignificant compared to trucking costs inside the U.S. It costs way more ship a box of rocks from L.A. to Houston than it does to ship it across the ocean.
I've started importing some products from China. It was a little scary at first, since these transactions are paid up front by the buyer (me). My experience has been good. You have to clearly explain the quality requirements you expect.
I've had a maker tell me prior to shipping that a product didn't meet the quality expectations. We juggled things to other OEM makers and everything shipped on time. They could have shipped the product, but they offered me a choice of a complete refund and an apology instead.
The number of Chinese companies producing quality products is growing every year. You have to know someone or learn where to go. Japanese companies have been building manufacturing facilities there for two decades now. At first, the products were distributed only domestically in China, but the quality has improved dramatically as a newer generation of workers and management have "grown up" being conscious of quality requirements for global sales. The older generation simply didn't care because they grew up in a government-driven environment of communism where they were paid the same regardless of the job or the quality of their work or service.
There's a common joke in China about companies selling to American buyers vs. Japanese buyers. The U.S. buyers take a cursory, 2 second look at a product and say it looks fine, he only cares about the price, while the Japanese buyer spends hours studying and testing the quality and cares less about the price.
Bottom line is that the quality I get is about the same as from the U.S. at about 70% less cost. I have to make some adjustments to products sometimes, but that cost isn't much. I also have less bureaucratic headaches shipping from China than from the U.S. There's just too much U.S. government interference now in my simple transactions. I'm treated like a criminal by the TSA and banks for buying and shipping products from the U.S. I have a choice, so I'm exercising that choice to buy somewhere else. The Chinese government doesn't make me do anything to buy and ship from China. There is no incentive for me to buy from the U.S.
The U.S. dollar has devalued and all these transactions in China are in dollars, so I get an added bonus of another 30% off from the price a couple of years ago.
Anyway, that's my first-hand experience.
