This is a strange observation and question about PayPal Extended Seller Protection vs regular Seller Protection. I haven't found an unambiguous answer in the paypal UA or help files but maybe a regular eBay seller knows.

In a nutshell, we were auto-enrolled in the Extended SP as powersellers in good standing although we do not sell on eBay and have not throughout 2008. Normally that would be no issue since Extended is regular plus some. But IS it really? Naturally we turned it off as soon as we noticed but I'm still curious. The thing is, in one place it states that with Extended you are covered for ebay transactions and says nothing about merchant services or off-eBay transactions. It's ambiguous, but with this company if it doesn't say specifically that you have a service you don't have it. In another place in the FAQ it states that off-ebay transactions ARE covered but again it's just ambiguous enough that it might be construed as meaning regular seller protection as opposed to extended.

The kicker is that after turning off the extended we see the "eligible" line in the paypal record, but with extended on we don't see the line. Again there's two ways to interpret that: everything (on eBay) is eligible with extended so it's not needed, or nothing is eligible because everything was off ebay and the line was missing. With Seller Protection, PayPal is emphatic that if you don't see the eligible line you aren't covered.

So does anyone know, which was it? Did extended seller protection turn off protection for off-ebay sales? Or did I needlessly discard extra seller protection by opting out of it?