Trading must be fun

Yesterday I was discussing Ragnarok Online trading system with a friend of mine and some interesting thoughts were found.

What I was thinking about - there is no fun involved with trading in RO, therefore it is not considered as a part of gameplay, rather a trivial function.
The trading profession in RO called "merchant" has only that Vending skill involved in trading, which allows players to sell items to other players in automated mode - merchant chooses which items he want to sell, puts them on shop and after that his character considered "on vend" - he is not allowed to move or do anything and he has that sign over his head - the shop name. Any person at place would click the sign, view the merchandise and maybe buy something. The actual "buy" happens automatically - the person takes the item from list and his money amount is automatically decreased by item price. Also in RO the merchant must stay in a game for days, weeks or even months - otherwise if he logs off the shop automatically closes and therefore he wouldn't sell anything. On private servers this feature is overriden by helper function @autotrade which allows players to log off and still have their merchants "on vend". However, the merchant profession becomes not enjoying and the two reasons why one would like to have a merchant are: to advance to next profession which gives more possibilites in PvM or PvP, though they are not so interesting in trading too.
The second reason is simply you would like to have a method of selling your items automatically even without your presence. That is not a bad point, but is it all about trading?
What I was thinking back there, there is almost no continuous learning thing in RO trading system, it burns-out really quick.
Like when you create your first-time merchant and start trading you have absolutely no idea of the supply and demand on market. After playing some time you'll discover that some loot is actually valued by some professions and you'll start collecting it. As the second step you would like to examine the market to find out the prices for the loot you were collecting so you can sell it without overcharging or discounting much. That's where it ends, after this the last learning step will be acquiring the list of the "demanded" stuff and their prices. In RO this list is very short. At this time the merchant profession ends to be interesting in terms of gameplay and serves only as a tool for selling items, which is the case why often players in RO create secondary "merchant" character, but not a primary one.

The things could be improved by some points, some thoughts on this:
- Setting trading level caps: each town has own trading cap, like Alberta is a 10 - 20 lvl trading zone, Al De Baran is a 35-50 lvl trading zone and so on. Trading cap means that you are not allowed to perform any activities which involve trading, though you can buy stuff from vendors. Also, the stuff sold is divided between the zones, so the player always has to examine the market.
- Providing useful tools for market analyzing etc.
- Advancing further: creating industry. Starting own business, hiring workers, managing finances, playing on stock market - each one of these is a broad field to play with.
- Socialize: stimulate player-on-player social trade play - negotiating the prices and other stuff