> Many people are not going to buy if there is no purchase protection.
Not going to buy from merchants they don't trust. No one on the face of the planet is concerned that Walmart is going to take their money and run off, and if that did happen, they would just sue them. The same goes for Amazon, Best Buy. PayPal's purchase protection is only necessary for people who you can't hold accountable either because you can't identify them or because they operate in some country that makes it impossible. If a hub for buying from random others wants, Ebay for example, it's very simple to just arrange to have the e-cash sent to them and then route that through their own system which does have purchase protection (in the case of ebay, that would incidentally be PayPal). The only ones you need to trust are those who run the service.
> If I buy in a shop, I get to investigate the item I want to buy before I pay.
To an extent. A lot of packaging can't be opened up, and some things you just can't check. If you use cash at Walmart to buy a toaster, and it turns out that the toaster is faulty and stops working 5 minutes after you plug it in, your only recourse is policies that either Walmart or the manufacturer has in place to make up for that incident. So you have to trust either Walmart or the manufacturer.
