As the 2025 peak season sales draw near, cross-border sellers are busy preparing for the year-end shopping spree, but they didn't expect the shipping market to "strike first". Recently, several shipping companies have intensively announced price increase plans, triggering a wave of soaring freight rates and bringing unexpected pressure to e-commerce sellers. The core reason is that shipping companies have taken advantage of the window period before the peak season to add Peak Season Surcharge (PSS), which has a wide range of impacts.

Maersk took the lead in imposing PSS on containers on the China-South Africa route starting from July 28, with charges of $1,000 and $1,600 for 20-foot and 40-foot containers respectively. At the same time, the peak season surcharge for its Far East-North Europe route also increased by $250-500. Hapag-Lloyd also announced that starting from August 1, it will add a PSS of $300 per standard container for the Far East-Australia route. This round of price increases covers major routes in Europe, the Mediterranean, Africa, Oceania and other regions, affecting the logistics costs of a large number of sellers.

It is worth noting that freight rates on the US route have not been adjusted for the time being. The main reason is that after Trump's tariff policy was implemented in May, Sino-US freight rates have been significantly pushed up. Data from the Shanghai Shipping Exchange shows that in May, the freight rates for the US West and US East routes both increased by more than 20%, and the current US West freight rate has reached $5,172/FEU. In addition, with rumors that Trump may implement a "reciprocal tariff" on August 1, a large number of importers shipped goods in advance from June to July, overdrawn capacity and curbed the imposition of PSS.

Although the market scale of the year-end peak season is promising - the global economic linkage is strengthening, cross-border e-commerce is expanding at a high speed, and the global B2C market is expected to reach $7.938 trillion by 2030, and the pressure on consumers' living costs may also drive the peak season procurement boom - sellers are facing many challenges. The rise in freight rates is just the tip of the iceberg: the resilience of the supply chain continues to be under pressure, and the peak of US route freight has led to the spread of congestion in global ports. Analysts point out that the problem of tight capacity will run through the whole year. In addition, there are frequent policy variables: the United States has canceled the duty-free preferential policy for small-value imports, and the European Union and Japan have also sent out similar tax signals; a Chinese official delegation will go to Sweden at the end of July for Sino-US economic and trade talks, which may trigger new changes in tariffs, and sellers need to pay close attention to the subsequent impact.