Path of Exile to Introduce Player Shops - Huge Quality of Life Upgrade to Trading in PoE

Path of Exile 2's upcoming "The Third Edict" update is introducing a brand new way to trade. The old way of trading won't be going away, you can always list your items in your stash and go face to face with other online players to trade your wares, but this new way makes things easier, while remaining flavorful and keeps people going to your hideout.

Path of Exile's New Trade System

The new system gives you a new Shop Keeper NPC, "Ange", in your hideout who manages your "Shop". This shop has its own set of merchant tabs, and when you place an item into the tab you will get to choose a price for it.

• Players find items listed in stores via the official website.
• When you find an item they want, you will click a button to teleport to the seller's shop in their hideout.
• Buying an item will remove the currency from their inventory and also cost a small amount of Gold as an additional fee.
• If you sold an item, the currency earned will be available on your shop vendor.
• Shops can be visited even if a player is online.

This is a very good way of handling a huge quality of life update to trading. Hideouts, which allow you to flex your design skills (and wallet) wouldn't matter as much if you could simply click some buttons on the website to buy items. Forcing players to still visit other players to buy their wares adds to the atmosphere and makes the game feel alive. Also, it should be mentioned that there is a cool discoverability aspect here as well. When you visit someone's shop, you might find other items you may be interested in as well.

The best part though? Definitely the fact you can buy stuff offline from people and hopefully if enough people are using this system, it will stop players from putting things up to undercut the market with no intention of selling or simply ignoring you. Path of Exile will never have perfect trading, but this new system feels very thematic to the game and definitely breaks down barriers. Keeping the old trading system is smart too because if you want to be actively trading, it can be beneficial for players to still do so because it won't cost them gold to do face-to-face trades.

Converting Old Stash Tabs to Merchant Tabs

If you are wanting to move on over to merchant tabs, without breaking the bank, you can convert your normal stash tabs into merchant tabs. To do so, Grinding Gear Games is adding functionality to the official website to convert tabs. Do note that it will not be possible to convert tabs that were purchased after the release of The Third Edict, they must be purchased beforehand to be eligible.

Path of Exile 1 will also get shop tabs, but initially since the system is only going to be in Path of Exile 2, any merchant tabs that are created through conversions will remain as regular tabs in Path of Exile 1 until the new system arrives in it.

This update arrives in "The Third Edict" patch for Path of Exile 2 which releases on August 29, 2025. No date for the arrival of the new trading system has been confirmed yet for Path of Exile 1 but they do plan to release it eventually.