Another problem is that there is such a wide spread, the offers and request have such a wide price difference. When you want to buy, you pay 15; when you sell, you get 4. It leads to stagnation and unreasonable prices.
Once upon a time, there was a very lively trade system in place. The difference to the one we have now? The trade fees. Currently, when you place an order, you immediately pay 10% of the order value as trade fee. When you later withdraw the order, you've lost it. No one wants that. Every organizer in any anonymous market ever organized understand that, wether it be goods, currencies, bonds, stocks, stock options, futures, you name it: the principle is always the same. You don't pay anything for issuing the order (though you often need a margin to make sure you CAN execute it when there is a counterparty accepting your offer), and you only pay transaction fees when the order gets executed. This leads to a lively market, where the trader are used to enter orders, leave them open, and withdraw them when the market changes.
Not so in CoW. You can't be a "trader" here, because withdrawing orders costs huge sums of money.
Another CoW history lesson from Big Daddy here: why was this changed? Well, people abused this system. When a city was about to be overrun, they would enter a market order at a very unlikely price. That made the resource "invisible" to the looter taking over the province, and that was never intended.
But instead of changing the system so offered-for-trade resources were still a part of your inventory (and thus lootable), Bytro decided to introduce the up-front fee... and basically killed market with it.
