At the moment the Merchant’s Guild is rather frustrating to work with and has a significant amount of friction when trying to pricecheck and list items. The changes introduced in Season 4 helped to a degree, but there’s still a lot of UI friction that probably isn’t intended. Here’s some miscellaneous suggestions and issues that would help to improve the Merchant’s Guild experience:
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When listing an item at that item’s merchant (which is needed to pricecheck it), listing the item puts you onto your “My Stall” tab rather than keeping you on the merchant’s listed item inventory. This is redundant information to view as there’s no need for me to view my listed items at that point, and directly inhibits the ability to quickly pricecheck and list items back-to-back at that merchant (like if I had a few pairs of boots I wanted to list, for example). You can press the back arrow to go back to the merchant’s listed item inventory, but this happening at all breaks the flow.
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Affix searches are currently too inflexible for if you’re trying to find an item that meets specific criteria. At the moment you can select required affixes and optional affixes. However, a feature that is missing that would see common use is the option to search for items that have a certain number of any of the selected affixes (in Path of Exile trade website terminology this is equivalent to a “Count” filter). For example, if I selected a list of 10 affixes and wanted to search for items that had 3 of any affix in that list, I can’t easily do that at the moment.
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Pricechecking and listing is difficult and extremely time-consuming because you need to go from vendor to vendor in the Bazaar zone. This problem is partially resolved for idols because there is a single vendor that can handle any type of idol. This should be further simplified down to allow for a single NPC that can handle any item type (wherein you’d specify the item category in the merchant’s search criteria), or if that’s too drastic, at least simplify it down to a few NPCs that can handle entire types of items (like an NPC that can handle all weapon types, one that can handle all accessory types, etc.).
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Related to the above, this issue is exacerbated because you have to go to an entirely different zone in order to pricecheck or list items. An NPC or a few NPCs in the Monolith (where the vendor, forge, and reward chest are) would go a long way to reducing this friction if it isn’t desired. Similar NPCs could be implemented for CoF functions.
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Alternatively to the above two suggestions, you could decouple listing/pricechecking/buying items from NPCs entirely, and allow players to open those panels with keybinds instead.
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When making a listing, the gold cost the player sets has a tax applied on top of it. When trying to price items lower than other players, this means that you have to fiddle around with the gold cost until you find a number that puts it lower than what the other player set their item to. A good way around this would be to instead make it so that the list price the player sets is what the item is actually listed for, and then subtract the tax price from that (basically subtract the tax from what the player gets when the item sells rather than adding it up front to the cost).
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When shift right-clicking in the merchant’s inventory screen to pricecheck an item, affixes that are automatically added to the search criteria are set to filter for their exact value as the minimum. This can make search results unnecessarily strict (typically resulting in no items showing up). The affix range when pricechecking should optionally be wider to allow for some variance (perhaps 20% lower than what the affix’s minimum roll in the filter is, as long as it wouldn’t cause it to go a tier lower).
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Pseudo affix searches would be helpful, for example a pseudo search that lets you search for if an item has a certain tier of any type of resistance rather than a specific type. This is technically currently doable, but takes up a majority of the 10 affix search limit.
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This one is a complete pipe dream but it would be very nice to have an exposed API for merchant’s guild listings so that items can be searched without actually being in the bazaar, and indeed from anywhere (think how Awakened PoE Trade works for Path of Exile). This information doesn’t even need to be completely live, cached information that’s a few hours old would perfectly suffice for this purpose.