Currently, traditional/active trading of goods is a dead lifeskill. Active trading is only used to go for Rich Merchant's Ring pieces, and then extremely rarely. To fix this, trading of Trade Manager goods needs to be more rewarding.

Idea #1

  Make distance bonus when selling Trade Manager goods significantly larger.

  If players are to spend some time with traditional trade goods, they need that time to be equivalently rewarded. If they're only getting a 20% bonus at most for travelling huge distances, why would they bother at all? Still cap things like gathering trade goods and crates at 20%, as they're biproducts and don't need any change, but increase the relative bonus for moving trade goods, as they're much harder to transport.

Idea #2

  Increase bargain bonus for Trade Manager goods.

  As simple as it sounds. Make the bonus from bargaining just hit much harder when working with trade goods. It'll let players make money more efficiently, still requires some input, as they have to do the bargain game and expend energy per attempt, and encourages purchase of equipment tailor coupon to turn the trader outfits into costumes for the extra bargain attempts.

Idea #3
  Increase general return per good via greater trade sell price.
  It's a little more convoluted, but increasing the ultimate sell price compared to the purchase price by a significant enough amount would also help revitalize the skill. It'd need to be quite a price hike, and may be more unpleasant to do than the other two ideas in terms of programming load.

Hopefully one or more of these are taken up, or at least get something moving to revamp the Trading lifeskill setup. It's always sad to see such an interesting part of a game left to rot because its profitability went down so far since its inception.

Idea #1

Just remove it, pointless. If you wanna trade, then do like people do it in an mmo, trade with other players, make sense right?

Idea #2

Merge it with bartering, that's the same, just on different name (their plan is making it like bartering though)

What they need to do is remove the desert trade buff, increase all trade good price by 250% equal to that of the buff, make repairable wagons, and make more master trade good routes beside the port ratt one. Would instantly make trading more viable, would be better than other means of semi active Silver? Most likely not but at-least this way more than 50m per hour would be viable rather than the 5m per hour we currently have. 

How and a complete overhaul of the smuggling system with it as well would be great.

After Odyllita and Elvia update almost all life skills are outdated and unprofitable compared to money from trash drop.

Only bartering left but only if you have very high barter exchanges and all routes.