Economists said the lower shipping costs, when they trickle down to New Zealand costs, could be deflationary but that higher wage costs and the weak New Zealand dollar would continue to put upward pressure on prices.
"Shipping costs are coming off globally, albeit belatedly, but it does appear that things are heading in the right direction, and at a rate of knots," Westpac senior agri-economist Nathan Penny said.
"From my discussions with various exporters, we are one of the last of the regions to see the benefits," Penny said.
"We are one of the smaller and more distant shipping destinations so we get the benefits much slower than, say the Shanghai-Los Angeles route.
"It's uneven at the moment. The likes of Fonterra and Silver Fern Farms have done well through this period, but the smaller exporters have really struggled," Penny said.
Joshua Tan, senior policy adviser at ExportNZ, said exporters had seen a softening in shipping costs.
"They are reporting lower figures but not the same as has been reported globally - but a softening of price, certainly.
"New Zealand is basically at the end of the supply chain. We might see it reflected in a couple of months but not at the moment.
"A lot of the big companies will be able to agree on prices before shipping dates, where a lot of these smaller exporters will be dictated to around booking at the time of shipping, which for them means that they will be more susceptible to price fluctuations."
Pre-Covid, exporters were paying $800 for containers, only to see that rocket up to $12,000 to $15,000 in the middle of the pandemic.
"Any relief at the moment is good relief for exporters," Tan said.
While shipping costs were easing, exporters were seeing rising costs elsewhere.
"The low New Zealand dollar is good for some exporters but in terms of import costs, the value of the NZ dollar means that they are being dictated to in terms of the price of raw materials."
New Zealand inflation came to 7.3 per cent for the year to June - its highest annual rate since 1990.
ANZ senior economist Miles Workman said Covid-driven bottlenecks in international shipping had been one of the factors behind high inflation, but their recent easing backed the bank's view that inflation had probably peaked.
"It is in line with the big-picture view that is built into our forecasts that headline inflation is going to slow from here," he said, adding it looked like the CPI peaked in the second quarter of this year.
"It [shipping costs] might provide some partial alleviation at the headline level but in the meantime there is domestic core inflation has been given far too much oxygen.
"Now we are seeing labour costs as the key and more persistent driver of higher inflation," he said.
