First the cliff notes version and then the full version.

Carpet bought in India was shipped via UPS to our house in WA. UPS left it at the door yesterday without signature drop. It wasn’t there when we got home today. I bought this using my PLT card. Should I go via purchase protection or try dealing with UPS/India shipper process?

Long story

I was in India back in March and bought a carpet from one of the government stores in Hyderabad. The salesman told me that it would be shipped to me later that week and that I should have it in a couple of weeks. Three weeks went by and I still didn’t have the carpet or a tracking number from them, so I called the store in Hyderabad, after a run around, I was told that they shipped it out three days after I bought the carpet, but didn’t have a tracking number or anything else to give me. Suddenly, about three days later I get an email from the company with a UPS tracking number. I put in the tracking number and it shows the package starting in Chennai, not in Hyderabad. I was a little concerned (three weeks to go from Hyderabad to Chennai), but it is India and figured maybe they send the packages to the major city by some local means instead of by UPS or other trackable means. I was ticked that it took them three weeks to move a carpet 200 miles and was about to challenge/dispute the charge then and there, but decided to wait and see if the actual carpet showed up (yes I was thinking bait and switch).

Then came the volcano. Somehow this volcano messed up UPS shipments from India to the US. Why they didn’t go the other way around the world is beyond me. The package spent from the 15th of April to the 23rd of April in Chennai when the UPS status switched to natural disaster exception. Two days later the package went to Mumbai and then on its way to the US. Well it got to the US on Tuesday and was delivered to our house yesterday the 28th. We do not have a signature release on file with them nor did the shipper require signature. When we went to check the front door for the package it wasn’t there. We searched around the house and checked with our neighbors and none of them grabbed the package.

So this leaves us with the question what to do. UPS says that we should contact the shipper and let them make the claim. Honestly I am not sure I trust the shipper. So I am left with the option of trying going through purchase protection, but I am not sure that will work either.

Has anyone here gone through purchase protection where the package was delivered but not their when you got home? What process will I likely go through to make this claim this way? The only time I ever used purchase protection it was for something that my wife left on the plane and it was only a couple hundred bucks. This carpet is a couple thousand, but well under the 10K PLT limit.

I appreciate your comments and thoughts on this.