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You have to just invent the demand I think. You simply cannot rely on the player base to need to buy as much as the player base will have to sell. In real life, one shop somewhere in Virginia or something sells all the bullets the US Govt used to need for the armed forces..... Illustrates simply this: people mud to be excellent at SOMETHING, whether it be warrioring, wizarding, or the making of widgets, and when you have lots of people running around playing at excellence you need the game to take the role of the drudges who work their work weeks and then buy the goods.
Work out the formula such that the market can get flooded with certain things such that they are no longer profitable, which will then motivate the players to seek out other things to make/steal/plunder.
I used to play this video game on Nintendo where you basically went around sailin from port to port, buying here and selling there, making money to buy larger boats to transport more goods, yada yada. Was fun.
Like most mud related things, I think it might also be necessary to establish a ceiling level for balance sake eventually, then you fiddle with the numbers depending on just how long and hard you think someone should have to work to advance.
I hope I am on topic! =) I have been on a game for some time now that has many cities and lots of possibilities for economic based play, but there are oplayer shops, and they turn out to be more like substitute houses than anything. You rent the shop, you may have a few small things that you have for sale low enough that someone might want to buy them, but the cities themselves are not coded to encourage someone loading a pack full of gold, for example, and dragging it to the Iron Hills where a lot of smiths are but where gold is in short supply. That is the sort of thing I'd like to see more of, motive for caravans yada yada.
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