I've never been fond of prioritizing who gets what 'stall' based on wealth, first come first served, etc. This creates an unfair advantage for early adopters or wealthy towns and leaves less room for new players or towns to be able to strive.
Something similar has been in the works for an.. upcoming.... thing... for the server. It's tough to say that towns just can't have their own stall, but while we do emphasize our town system, not everybody lives in one. We need to see about creating the fairest possible system. The other issue with personalized stalls is the ugly ones. I like the idea of having a market but I also like the idea of being able to sort of visually control it. Could be persuaded otherwise though.
In my 'market system', it wasn't so much that you had your own stall, but there were chests and each one represented an item or group of items. Take, for example, a "food chest". You could sell any of the cooked foods that minecraft has to offer and if you know you specifically wanted food, you'd know where to go rather than be forced to search among many shops just to find something you wanted (no problem with this, really, because it does encourage some exploration and work on the part of the consumer). This would also ensure you have the ability to comparison shop for the best price on items instead of having to find out which 5 random stalls are selling cooked steak and then buy from the cheapest one.
As for the chests, the way I think of it (and this has flaws I'm sure) is something like below:
In this example, all players who choose sell (steak, in this example) will have their specific stack of steak visible in the left column of the chest. All other players' steak is also in that column (or both columns if enough is being sold). Now at this point, either the steak is ordered from top to bottom either randomly, by name of player, or by lowest price. Hovering over the steak, one can see perhaps the seller and certainly the asking price. Because emeralds aren't necessarily important for everyone in the server, perhaps the asking price could be whatever you want, iron ingots, glass, something weird... We'd probably need to limit some of the things that could be used, but it's an idea. This makes the system more of a trade economy than a simple bank with items.
Taking the steak out and putting in your inventory will complete the transaction and, providing you have the proper items in your inventory, you can complete the purchase. Some of the harder to figure out things about this are the actual mechanics of selling things. I guess I envision a 'sell menu' much like with /menu whereby you put in the item(s) you wish to sell and then immediately after put in the exact amount you're selling it for. So if you're selling 64 steak for 2 diamond blocks, you put in the full stack of steaks, then you put in 2 diamond blocks, then you click a final item (option) to confirm the sale, then it'll show up.
As for recovering your successful trade... stuff, either there is some central repository double-chest in which all of your profits are stored for your recovery, or there is an additional menu within each chest you're selling at that you can do so at. Probably the "mailbox chest" would be the easiest for everyone.
Anyway, long winded, but those are my thoughts on the matter. Thoughts?
