Shipping damage advice post

[fenrirs-child.livejournal.com]

A few weeks ago I purchased some fur and a partially used gallon of resin from someone on Fursuit Auctions. It took them a few weeks to ship it, and only after I did some digging and messaged them on FA because they weren't responding to me on LJ. They shipped it UPS and it was supposed to arrive yesterday, and on the tracking info it's saying it was damaged in transit and is being returned to sender. I messaged them again on FA last night when I noticed that (I checked when I realized it was too late for UPS to be dropping anything off), and it's still early so they haven't replied yet. I'm not really sure what I should do though. If something's damaged, I can't see it being anything other than one of the bottles of resin, and if that's the case then everything's ruined. Should I open a Paypal dispute? I don't want to screw this person over by doing that, because I don't feel at all that this was malicious, but at the same time I can't really afford to throw away money either. I'm a little worried though, that if the resin bottle came open in transit as opposed to being punctured that UPS won't pay out on any claim due to poor packaging. If this was a company, I wouldn't think twice about filing a Paypal dispute, but because it's another individual (and I wouldn't want it to happen to me) I'm hesitant. What do y'all think?