I worked with Michael directly and he was supremely cool to me. But it sounds like they had tons of issues and it all became a huge time suck and loss leader for them. In other words, the amount of issues and complaints they got from US customers wasn't worth their time.
I paid quite a bit for shipping and accepted responsibility for whatever happened.In the past we stopped shipping such case parts to outside of Europe, because (mostly in USA) we had many problems with USPS and damaged or lost packages.