Amazon Sales of Hikvision China Cameras

I find this to be very disturbing and alarming to say the east.  Consumers do not fully understand nor do they care about implications this presents to the market.  The average guy will only be motivated and influenced by the price factor, not concerned with limited support or capabilities.

wow thats pretty bad, never saw one that actually had the chinese writing on the box and the camera alongside English. I do wish Hikvision would do something about this as we get tired of giving the daily talk of why customers should not buy off Amazon and why they should buy from us.

Their is an easy way for Hikvision to do something about this actually. Amazon has a process called "Brand Gating" which prohibits sellers from selling a certain brand on Amazon unless they go through a very difficult process proving that they have permission from the manufacturer to sell the brand on Amazon. I know this first hand as I tried to sell some Seagate Skyhawk drives and I was denied, even though I gave proof of invoices that I purchased them from an authorized Seagate distributor. I even heard of stories where people have letters direct from the manufacturer and still were denied the ability to sell a certain product. Its very hard to say the least. And all Hikvision has to do is contact Amazon to get this put in place for their brand.

I will say that one thing is alarming to me is I think that Hikvision actually sold some cameras to "Amazon the company". Case in point:

These cameras are being shipped and sold by Amazon. Now its possible that Amazon bought these from a 3rd party seller, but highly unlikely due to Amazon's beast buying power. I doubt any 3rd party seller would have the qty of products that Amazon would want to mess with. My guess is they bought these direct from Hikvision. Its possible Hik was trying to get rid of a bunch of them, but as far as I know, this camera is still available for sale under normal distribution. I know it is for the OEM side anyways.   

Would professional installers use Amazon for such risky cameras, grey imports?

Hikvision on Amazon is doing around $1,000,000+ USD / month from Amazon.

Some models selling up to 2k units a month! this is for a average distributor a acceptable sell for one model!

Seems not bothered to register for Brand Gating with Amazon, perhaps the numbers of the smaller sellers are not worth the effort.

IPVM educational as ever. :-)

Its worth mentioning that Hikvisions North American Support will not touch these cams. If you happen to brick the cam with a Firmware upgrade, or need any support whatsoever, Hik NA will deny you any support if the Serial is Chinese. I understand the flow of these cams into the US market is hard to control for any entity involved. But you would think with "Hikvision" printed on the side of the product, Hikvision the manufacturer would offer some kind of support. Even Axis NA will support any cam as long as its within the Warranty Period (from what I'm told).

We were burned years ago when we somehow wound up with Chinese serialized units that came in Brown boxes with small white Hik labels. When we recently went to update the firmware, everything turned Chinese, and we had to swap out 30 cams eating the cost. Absolutely no help from our local Hik RSM or Distributor as the initial purchase was years ago. Never experienced a reluctance to help with any other manufacturer, but never had a situation remotely similar. 

Hikvision is ultimately to blame here. Every cam has a serial number which can be tracked back to US or Asian location. If Chinese cams are ending up in the US, come down hard on the originating supplier. The policy of not supporting their own products sold on Amazon because they're too lazy to police the sales channels hurts integrators, end users, and puts shame on the entire market. Its embarrasing and awkward when you have to explain to customer why your price is 3 times more for the same product they see on Amazon, because the manufacturers ignorance and business practices allow it. Trust in the brand is immediately lost by both customer and integrator. We have both a customer and friend that bought Hik online after seeing our price, only to brick the cams after firmware updates. They will never buy another Hik product again regardless of price, and neither will we. 

Another thing to consider here is that a third party is minipulating the firmware to be english. You have no idea where that firmware came from and if anything else has been changed to compromise security of the camera. 

I don't buy HIK cameras or their OEM counterparts.  I choose not to support them, I think we should all be more proactive in this regard.