Incidents where a large number of containers are lost off a ship happen a few times a year. A small number of containers being lost happens more frequently. The total averages about 1400 containers lost per year, but that’s out of nearly 800 million total shipments, so in total it’s only like 1 out of ever 500,000 containers. Plus, a lot of individual parcels go by air, not by consolidated ocean shipments.
So our personal flashlight orders straight from China should be safe, but distributor shipments could be at some very small risk of washing overboard.
There’s some statistics here:
2013 definitely stands out due to an entire container ship sinking. I think that also might have been the year there were a bunch of bad storms in the north Atlantic. I remembering having a project at work in shipment at the time and wondering when the tracking information stopped being updated for about a month if the past year’s worth of work was sitting at the bottom of the North Sea.