I have multiple ideas, but on reflection I realised that they all had a lot of principles in common, so I thought maybe it would be more useful to set some of those out so other people can improve on and add to them before trying to produce specific proposals.
1) Give us other things to do with our coins and supplies. Most of us use the Wholesaler primarily to offload our excess, because there's nothing else for us to do with it but scout and buy KP, both of which have obvious limitations. We already needed more things to do with our surplus, but now we need them more.
2) Restore the first page to (more or less) the way it was before the change. The only people who would regularly buy small amounts of Tier I goods are very new players who haven't found trading partners and/or don't have enough goods to make many trades with. For people in those positions, this is essential to get them on their feet. You could alter the concept slightly so that each purchase slightly increases the costs, but seriously, the old first page was vital for a lot of new cities. People with larger cities who are trying to unload excess are aiming to spend larger chunks of change for more goods; they're unlikely to use the first page, and it sounds like that's the demographic you want to affect anyway.
Someone upthread suggested unlocking multiple Trader techs, and that would be an easy way to have something like the old first page (plus maybe similar things for the Tier II and III goods, depending on when the second tech was unlocked?) available for newer cities and then the More Dynamic System offering more goods for more advanced players.
3) Give us more variety in the offers, in terms of currency. The pattern right now is: for each Tier, one good is available for either coins or supplies, the other for boosted goods. We really want more choice in what we can buy. It would be better if we had one coin and one supply offer (at least) for each Tier. There are multiple ways you could do that: you could have the same basic setup as the old system (each currency for each good) but with the shifting prices; you could have, in each tier, one good going for coins, the other for supplies, and then also one of the two for boosted goods; and so on. But a player with excess supplies needs more than one option of how to spend them, especially when we have nothing else we can do with those excess supplies; and if there is a particular good we need, and a specific currency we want to use, we ought to be able to make that happen even if doing so is rather more expensive that day than we'd prefer.
4) Soften the blow with the ratios. The increasing costs make sense as a feature, but the way they're set now is a bit excessive. I think there are actually a lot of other ways this could be done that would be legitimately more interesting and also friendlier, e.g.:
a) Setting the starting offer to be an actually good deal, then the second (or third) offer at the old base value, and then getting steeper above that.
b) Increasing the quantity of goods received along with the price, but at a lower rate. So for example, say the starting offer was for 100 goods at 100% base price; the second offer was 110 goods at 120% base price; then 120 goods at 140% price, and so on. That way, things do get more expensive, but you're also getting more goods each time, so the situation is psychologically more satisfying.
c) Increase the costs at the same rate you currently are, but after every third purchase rather than after every single purchase.
And so on, but I think it's important that we're able to feel like we can get a good deal, even if we can only get it once or twice.
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I think it could be interesting if there were multiple daily deals available for each good, which varied in terms of how favourable they were. So for instance, say one day you can get better-than-default deals on marble, but steel is more expensive, and the next day the opposite is true. Or you could have variation by currency rather by good: maybe today, I can get marble for a good price if I pay in coins, a normal price if I pay in steel, and a somewhat more expensive price if I pay in supplies. Or you could vary the amount of goods by the currency -- say a deal for 100 marble involving coins, but a deal for 250 marble involving supplies.
(Stopping now before I start trying to make specific proposals like I said I wasn't going to.)
