Funny you should mention it!
I played the base game merchants a few times solo last fall, but decided that it had potential as a game I could explore with my partner.
In the meantime, I did pledge for the new big box expansion, and had thrown the other 3 add-on merchants onto my wishlist for when they would get restocked. A couple of weeks ago, I saw a big Merchants Cove bundle on a geeklist auction that was an unbelievable deal, so I had to go for it. Long story short, I now have 2 copies of the base game and The Secret Stash mini-expansion, along with two copies of the big box expansion coming via Kickstarter (one for the copy I pledged for, 1 for the copy that came with the auction bundle), and all 3 of the add-on merchants.
Unfortunately, one of the add-on merchants arrived missing some components, so I haven’t posted about it in recent purchases as I await the resolution of that particular issue.
It’s not a great euro game. But it’s fun and quick and light. It’s not going to win any awards. I think it fits in my collection because it features a singular thing: the option for one player to deep-dive on a specific merchant while another player, for instance (me) can explore the wide array of different options… and that won’t really interfere with the first player’s enjoyment of their merchant-deep-dive because the merchants don’t interact directly with the mini games each one is playing on the side.