Public Service Announcement
eBay's Buyer Protection works, but you're not guaranteed to have it as a buyer on eBay. If eBay determines (the criteria for which is a secret, apparently) that your purchases have been "risky," then they'll revoke Buyer Protection on your purchases without warning.
I discovered this recently when an item from China was overdue by a month. Going to "Item didn't arrive" greets you with a message that Buyer Protection is not available on your purchase. Thanks, eBay, for punishing me for things outside my control.
Thankfully, the item arrived after all. I guess it's AliExpress from now on for buying goods from China.
Ouch. That deserves to be propagated widely.
Is there any "documentation" available, e.g. a screenshot showing the eff-off message?
Unfortunately, I didn't save a screenshot and the items have since arrived.
This isn't new, I found this out 8 months ago, for international purchases you only have 30 days to raise a INR claim, after that the dispute process is meaningless as it can't be escalated to ePay.
I had also assumed it was because it was too late after the estimated arrival time, so I checked another one that was within the range of the arrival estimate and it also returned the same message: No longer covered by Buyer Protection.
That's when I dug up many posts in the eBay Community forums complaining about not having coverage and some threads saying that eBay has revoked Buyer Protection before. Some cases were pretty clear-cut in that the buyer had very bad feedback history or waited too long to open an INR case. I don't fit either. So, the only conclusion I could come to was that I had triggered some limited due to orders from China not arriving. From memory, I think I've used Buyer Protection two or three times.