Two products with the same factory price can land at wildly different costs, and freight is usually the reason nobody expects. These pages rank ten categories by what their packing actually does to the container.
Every figure below comes from running that category’s real carton through the container engine and the landed-cost engine. Density is the product of the pack, not an assumption about the industry.
Each page costs a full container line by line, compares the four container types, prices the same shipment in six markets and lists the certification that gates the sale.
Freight is 1.4% of FOB. Duty and notification timing decide the outcome.
Read the breakdown → Packed tight, slow to approveFreight is 3.8% of FOB. The duty spread and the registration calendar are the levers.
Read the breakdown → DG rules change the freightThe developer sachet decides your carrier list. Landed multiple 1.07×× on a full box.
Read the breakdown → Volume-limited, freight-dominantFreight is 15.9% of FOB. Flat-packing cuts it to $0.0208 per unit.
Read the breakdown → Weight-limited, tariff-exposedThe container is 60% empty by volume, and Section 301 is worth five times the freight.
Read the breakdown → Volume-limited, plug-specificFreight is 6.3% of FOB — 2.2× the duty. The carton grid, not the rate, sets it.
Read the breakdown → Volume-limited, freight-dominantFreight is 39.8% of FOB, at $23.08 a chair. Knocked down it falls to $5.81.
Read the breakdown → Well-packed, certification-ledFreight is 5.1% of FOB with 93.6% of the container used. Duty runs 0% to 25%.
Read the breakdown → Tariff-led, size-curve riskDuty is 3.6× the freight at $1.21 a pair. The size curve is worth more than both.
Read the breakdown → Dense, high-value, scope-sensitiveFreight is 1.4% of FOB, the lowest here. A 39.2% packing saving moves landed by $0.0252.
Read the breakdown →Ocean freight is charged per container. Freight per unit is that number divided by the units you fit in the container — so a rate change of 10% moves your landed cost by 10% of the freight line, while a packing change of 10% moves it by 10% of the freight line and changes how many units you are dividing by. The second lever is bigger, and it is free.
Below roughly 150 kg per cubic metre you are volume-limited: the container fills with air before it reaches its payload, and every millimetre of void is billed. Above roughly 400 kg per cubic metre you are payload-limited: the container is heavy before it is full, and the answer is a shorter box, because a 20ft GP carries more weight than a 40ft HQ.
In categories where the tariff is high — 20% or more in several African and Latin American markets, or a Section 301 line into the United States — the duty line is larger than the freight line and the packing work is a second-order optimisation. Cost the tariff first, then the box.
If your destination matters more than your category, the corridor pages take the same method country by country. If your carton matters more than the category, the container loading calculator will tell you what it does to the floor.