My experience with EA on a product purchased was not good. I posted my displeasure online here, albeit perhaps showing my upset too much, and the thread was yanked.
So how one says things here is very important, and the OP has done a great job showing the facts in pictures and not being unnecessarily critical.
The EA folks are a lot more "local" than their marketing presence suggest. With all the videos they make, one could expect them all to be wearing smartphones 24/7 and responding to
issues within hours, not days. But it took me days and days to hear from them. This is fact. The facts speak for themselves. Much of the equipment they sell under their own name is made by others.
Good local Southern companies, and overall I think they offer good value for the dollar spent. But if you expect EA to provide state of the art service and response time, well, things go more slowly down there.
The challenge with mail ordering something heavy like implements is you can't send it back easily or cost effectively. So if your plow comes through with a scratch, you get sent a can of spray paint and are told to fix it yourself.
After all, it's a plow... But if the implement is incorrectly constructed, and welding is always an issue with imported goods, than the original mfg has to make it good, and promptly. And making it good is reimbursing the purchaser for actual costs in getting the item repaired or fixed to original spec, if it can be. If not, a full refund is the only fair solution, and if they want to, the mfg. can pay to ship it back to them on their dime. Shipping eats up all the profit so no one wants to pay for it.
But c'mon EA, you sold it, you refund the repair money, cheerfully and promptly, get your money back from the mfg., and everyone goes home happy. Stall, deny or not aggressively try to make the customer happy and threads like this will continue to pop up. Most of us at TBN want EA to be successful so no one is throwing rocks, but the only way to improve things is to tell the emperor that his clothes are falling off. A smart emperor will tighten up his belt.
I was told by the Moderator that business disputes were not to be discussed online here, particularly those with advertisers. That does put a serious crimp on discussion which I don't think any of us are particularly comfortable with.
So likely this post/thread will disappear in due course. Of course if the post was glowingly positive, I'm sure it would stick around...which ought to be offset by some tolerance of reasonable, honest presentation of facts, even if they don't put the advertiser in the best light. Not a perfect world out there, and we all have to be reasonable, but TBN wants the advertiser to get a chance to resolve things offline first. If that did not work, seems the issue should be fair game from then on out. Our benefit and I suppose protection here is our public voice, not the one that gets deleted with the click of a mouse. Drew