Right now there are so few options for escrow in the typical ecommerce space, such as for an eBay transaction or for the Craigslist buyer.
Escrow.com, for example, charges a minimum of $25 per transaction so using escrow.com for an $80 purchase is prohibitively expensive. Here is their fee chart:
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http://escrow.com/support/calculator.aspAnd Escrow.com is seen as one of the "least expensive" escrow providers as well. The reasons escrow is so expensive include the fact that the escrow organization is pricing in chargeback risk and that there are extensive regulations regarding escrow service providers.
While we do now have several Bitcoin-supporting escrow services offering a service similar to escrow.com, the problem is that not very many merchants can make use of those services as they do not (yet) accept bitcoin for payment.
I wonder if there would be an opportunity for an escrow service to accept bitcoin as payment, immediately convert that payment to USD (or whatever currency is used for the purchase), and then to escrow that government currency amount until either the escrow is released or the payment goes to arbitration (or whatever happens after non-completion).
That way the customer deals in bitcoins and the merchant benefits by needing to make no changes to their systems other than perhaps the equivalent of using the escrow service as the "Bill To", and then shipping to the customer once the escrow service has received payment.
