How can Chinese companies ship products to the US cheaper than it costs to ship the same items across town?

Question

How can Chinese companies ship products to the US cheaper than it costs to ship the same items across town?

In: Economics

Answer 1

Economies of scale, government subsidies on shipping to promote manufacturing/trade… but the biggest thing is that they’re loading orders into shipping containers with 10,000 orders at a time and sending those over vs. 10,000 individual packages getting handled by UPS or Fedex from China to the US.