When an imported caravan fails, the customer's claim lands on the business that sold it to them, not on the factory that built it. That is the practical shape of importer liability, and it is fixed when you place the order rather than when the first fault arrives. The factory's warranty is a commercial promise between two businesses, and it does not travel with the van.

The customer's claim stops at your door

In most consumer markets the seller owes the end customer a remedy by law, whatever the unit's country of origin and whoever manufactured it. The wording of that right, the period it runs for and who carries the cost of labour differ from market to market, so confirm the position for your own market with a local adviser instead of relying on a supplier's document. What you hold against the factory is a different instrument: a supplier warranty whose value depends entirely on the terms in your order contract. A sentence on a proforma invoice is not a service agreement, and if it does not name parts, labour, timeframes and who pays freight on a claim, you are funding the difference yourself.

What to fix in the supply agreement before the deposit

Four terms turn a supplier warranty into something you can actually staff, and all four are cheapest to fix before the deposit:

• Parts supply term. How long after the warranty period does the factory guarantee to supply model-specific components, and on what price basis?
• Technical documentation in your language. Wiring, plumbing and a parts list with component part numbers, so your technician is not reverse-engineering the van.
• A named escalation route. A contact rather than a general inbox, plus an agreed time for acknowledging a fault report.
• Notification of running changes. The right to be told when a component that affects the approved specification is substituted.

Rebranding moves the obligation to you

Sell under your own brand and the factory becomes invisible: your logo, your paperwork, your phone number on the van. The customer cannot see the supply chain behind it, and "the factory is looking into it" is not an outcome they will accept. Every promise in your brochure, including the warranty document, becomes yours to honour in your own market.

Traceability becomes your responsibility too. You need a record tying each unit to a production run and noting component changes between runs, so a fault can be isolated to one batch rather than every van you have sold. Importers who rebrand through off-road caravan OEM production should treat that record as part of the product; without it, one defect can freeze your whole stock position.

Three budgets, and only one is covered by cargo insurance

Warranty labour is the cost importers most often under-budget: the factory may send parts, but someone in your market has to fit them, and that someone is you. Recovering parts cost from the factory is a separate line, available only if the agreement says so. Liability cover for injury or property damage is a third commitment, and it is a different policy from cargo insurance, which ends once the unit reaches your yard. All three belong in your retail price before the first sale, not in the post-mortem after the first claim.

None of this is unusual for imported goods — it is the normal position of any business that puts its name on something built by another. The parts term, the documentation and the escalation route are decided at order stage, and that is the only moment when they are cheap to get right. LZM is an off-road caravan manufacturer and exporter in China supplying dealers and importers in Australia, New Zealand and the United States.

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