Eh?
Our clan has been selling goods for ~27 gold profit almost since Strategus started back up. Not sure what we'll get now that the travel bonus has been increased, but "more than that", I'm sure.
Yes, there is a risk in travel but that's standard wargaming: small risk = small gains, big risk = big gains. Becoming allied with at least one neighbor would be an important money making scheme -- or else securing a large enough swath of the map for yourself and not just two or three villages next to each other. Max gain is 500%, but consider a more reasonable scenario:
500 goods
Make in a low cost village for 3 each
Sell in a high cost village for 25 each with a travel bonus of 200%
47 profit each = 23,500 profit
Figure 11 people are doing this -- 10 producers and 1 who does nothing but travel. That's about 42 gold per person per hour. They'd make about 77k in a week.
Incidentally, if you can get other clans to buy your stuff, there's a lot of potential money there. Like, tons.
Picture, if you will...
* I can produce one-handed axes for 31 each.
* You can buy them from the market for 63 each.
* I can produce 15 of them per hour (recent change -- used to be you had a 15% chance per skill point; now it's a 100% chance per skill point, assuming the village is also 100%)
So I make 300 of them (20 hours work, 9300 cost) and sell them on the market for 50 each. You save 13 each, I make 19 each. That's 5700 gold profit for 20 hours of work.
I just made 285 gold/hour.
And that's for low end crap and relatively low skill points (15). Let's try mail shirts, which are higher end, and I have 34 skill in them.
* I can produce mail shirts for 82 each
* You can buy them from the market for 199
* I can produce 34 of them per hour
So let's say I make 102 shirts which takes 3 hours and costs 8364 gold (trying to keep my initial investment similar to the axe example).
I sell them for 158. You save 41 each, I profit 76 each (same price ratio as in my axe example), so 7752 profit for 3 hours of work, which comes out to 2584 gold per hour.
Of course, the question is "who's going to buy mail shirts for 158 each". Maybe nobody will. But if you were in a pinch with an enemy attack coming and you needed 102 new mail shirts right now, then maybe you would. It's cheaper than buying it from a fief.
(Ideally I'd be making +3 mail shirts, which would probably be a lot easier to find buyers for and still make a tremendous profit.)