Amazon Sales of Hikvision China Cameras

This to me is partly Amazon's fault. Replica products, gray market, products without warranty are all over Amazon and Amazon doesn't do much about it. Yes you can challenge the validity of a product but it's very difficult. Ask many Amazon sellers that have had their products copied how hard it is to get amazon to remove the other products. Amazon only cares if the product is similar enough without any regard to service, warranties, or other aspect that provides the overall user experience of a product over time. 

Interesting, when I look at it closer it says 
"backordered, In stock on January 24th"
Which means they are still regularly ordering them

Hikvision will never properly police the sales channels. They tell you they will but they have both branded and OEM teams actively competing against each other. Add to that the direct from China sales that no one has any control over, by design  

Their goal is to sell as many products as possible, regardless of the means, regardless of ethics. Period. 

The policy of not supporting their own products sold on Amazon because they're too lazy to police the sales channels hurts integrators...

Usually, IMHO, integrators prefer manufacturers NOT support their unauthorized product.  Wouldn't it be worse for integrators if the firmware COULD be updated without issue?

In another lifetime, I worked for a distributor and was constantly battling against counterfeit circuit breakers. Many of the electricians didn't care, buying lots from whatever shady website they could save a buck a piece. There is only so much the manufacturer and distributor can do to protect the channel. The person buying the cameras needs to bear responsibility of what they are ultimately installing.

Would you expect Dell to provide tech support on a PC if you decided to go in and load your own hacked bios?

Would you buy a new car from some stranger on the street if he was 40% cheaper than the dealer?

If Hikvision really cared, or didn't actually own these shell companies, they could tell US Customs to seize all shipments with the Hikvision trademark/brand unless it's officially sanctioned by them. It's not too hard. Sure the little onesies-twosies will get through, but any containers or larger air shipments won't.

Great point!  In Cyber Security, if the camera is in an unknown state or the settings are not in a known good state, then you default the camera and flash the firmware.  

Pretty silly that flashing the firmware bricks the camera.  If it was that hard to get the camera in English mode, a simple firmware upgrade shouldn't undo this...

They should have a worldwide firmware that uses the serial number to localize the product.

The fact that so many grey-market suppliers know how to hack the cameras to make a few $ on Amazon is an issue.  Does any other camera manufacturer have people routinely hacking their firmware???  All because they sell domestic product for $ less.....

Stopping low priced items is like sweeping back the ocean with a broom.

Overall, for sure.

But every individual manufacturer can control their own channel / pricing if they choose to do so. The only question is whether they are willing to expend the money to enforce and suffer lost sales from that channel control.

What appliance laws are there which say any device can't be subjected to a hack / attack?

As yet nobody will stop you using any device you care to plug onto any internet, with only the exception of say a 4G mobile network. Where the IMEI number of the phone would not or at least shouldn't work if not approved by the telecom company hosting the service.  Certification for cell networks is a massive cost few would like to pay, and also is the timescale for these approvals.

Only thing I could say is if IPv6 address are encoded into devices so that this can act as a serial number / authentic device, be it approved or otherwise for internet traffic! ( just a thought! ). This could be a future way in which security can be part of all devices.

Grey imports don't help everyone. Hikvision can buy a few of these imported device, track the serial numbers to the Chinese supplier and cut them off in less than 10minutes work. Would they do it? should they do it? do they care?

Just to play devil's advocate here, from an end customer standpoint, a lot of points here aren't very strong reasons to buy authorized. Don't get me wrong, I still believe you should buy authorized products, I just don't think these reasons provide the strongest arguments. 

"Are backed by local sales and engineering support" - The end customer doesn't always get this support, the integrator does but not the end customer. 

"Are supported by local tech support..." - Hikvision NA doesn't support end customers. They explicitly say integrators should be providing the support to the end customer. So to the end customer, the manufacturer doesn't provide support either way. 

"Offer products backed by manufacture's warranty" - true, but to replace a camera still requires it to be sent back which may take weeks to get back and they'll still have to pay labor to remove and replace the unit. If the camera from the gray market cost 70-50% less, a new camera can just be purchased and installed within days 1-2 times before this method costs more than authorized. 

"Offer project registration and project discounts" - for Hikvision NA this only applies to projects higher than $15,000 which is typically going to be a 30-50 plus camera system. Many buying from Amazon aren't buying that many. 

Our overall argument for Authorized is security and firmware upgrades to patch security issues and our personal service and support to our customers. We do mention local support but mention it as more of a chain of local support (in the end it's still up to us as the integrator).

I'd be curious to hear what other integrators say to end customers when they ask about amazon products.