Managing the buying and selling items is so timeconsuming and clunky right now. Players typically need to reference sourcebooks to see what is available, track down the item to add it, and then manually remove the gold from their inventory.

I would love if there were some 'shops' that players could view to see what is available to them (I usually say anything with an assigned value on the PHB equipment page is fair game in a large town or city: https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/basic-rules/equipment), and then be able to click 'purchase' to have the gold vale deducted and the item added to their inventory.

This alone would be a HUGE boon to character creation. Figuring out what Items they get is BY FAR the biggest complaint I get from new players, and even as an experienced player is the most frustrating part of character creation. Not buying things is often the biggest shortcut I see new players take as well, and not having a wide variety of items available really limits their options, which is one of the most uniquely creative parts of D&D.

As an extension of this, I would love to be able to homebrew some shops that I could make available to my players. In addition to selecting what mundane items they have access to, I would love to give them a list of specific magic items that are available to them at a certain shop, the assigned value, and a count of how many are in stock.

I would love to be able to decide how many healing potions, special pieces of ammunition, and maybe a few unusual items are available before a session begins and then let my players peruse that list and just buy them as they see fit. This would allow me to spend more time on describing the world and developing story and characters, and less time working out how many arrows and potions my party wants to buy.

From a creative aspect, my party tends to spend a number of sessions in and around a city and developing these shops and deciding what is in them would also allow my party to get a glimpse into the character of that town. There might be a lot of potions, poisons, and spell components... but very little armor and weapons. The tavern shop (menu) might have bottles of fine wine but no ale in a really nice town. The Inn in a rougher region might have nothing but grog.

The last step of the character generator pretty plainly lays out starting equipment with any options.

Shop inventory is always going to be a DM by DM basis, i.e. it's up to us to figure that out and present it to the players. I don't see the need to commit resources to a feature like this. 

I can understand the desire to have this and do agree it would make basic shopping much easier. So it is a good thing to suggest, since if we do get it then it will see some use.

However, there are some problems. First, this will not be an easy thing to make. It's not some huge thing, but it's more complicated than you might think. There's multiple frameworks to work with: campaign system, inventory system, books referencing and its own database on top. Not massive, but bringing it all together in a way that fits with the user interface without causing other interface issues? That'll be time-consuming. Plus, converting your coins automatically? Another annoying (as in tricky) and time-consuming thing to implement, yet absolutely vital to make this shop system work.

There can be other issues that can detract from the usefulness: like haggling. I've yet to play a game where haggling with the shopkeeper wasn't a thing. How do we propose to introduce an ad-hoc price-adjustment system run by the DM on a per-character basis (for what price one can get may differ to what another character can). Possible. But difficult. Oh, and what of secret items? Illegal stuff, dangerous magic items, etc - stuff the vendor may have but only if they 'know' you or if you say the secret phase? Which brings us to another complication: controlling when a specific vendor price-list can be accessed. It's going to be tedious for a DM having to toggle them on and off all the time, but if left on and open players might use it accidentally when not supposed to.

What about player-run shops, should D&D Beyond basically make a text-based Shop SImulator game into this as well?

What about when players when to pay with items rather than coin? In the times D&D is set in coin was actually less commonly used - most people used bartering with goods and services as payments in a lot of places.

It just seems like a huge amount of work and effort than few people want and even fewer will actually benefit from. Personally, making a shop list in a text file as and when needed, and just copying that to the group will work out faster. Most of the time shops aren't arranged in advance and may be just improved when needed. This is why magic items in DMG aren't priced: they're given a range so you as DM can just make up a figure in that range that seems reasonable at time - potions of greater healing? Mid range normal, high range in scarce supply. Prices would realistically flunctuate very often based on the changes of supply and demand which can be further affected by events like wartime, crime waves, political shifts, etc. Most shops of that era don't use price tags for things - prices are changed as needed, like if somebody in noble attire of silks and fine linens came in, they might be given higher prices than somebody who comes in dressed in tattered cloth, dirt streaks and old clothes. It is frankly easier for a DM to improv this than try to create and constantly adjust tables on the site. It also frees the DM to 'just so happen' add items into a shop stock if the players ask about a specific thing not on some predefined list. Likewise sticking to predefined lists can make things underwhelming if what they want isn't on the list because the DM didn't predict they'd need it.

So it's just a whole lot of complicated work for something the vast majority of DMs just don't need because it's actually better to improv it.

I can see some more use for "starting equipment" where players choose Wealth instead of the starting packs/options. But even then, it's simple enough : if you're using D&D Beyond then you are on a device that will most likely have a built in calculator, and a browser that supports tabs. Enter starting gold on calculator. Open a tab to the basic equipment list, choose item, subtract cost on calculator, add item on charcater sheet, choose another item, subtract cost, add item, and so on until you're chosen everthing. Override Gold total on sheet to what is now on calculator. Done. Easy peasy and nobody had to spend weeks to months coding it instead of working on other, more important, things.

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Good idea, but frankly they are much better things the devs need to work on.