When you buy the game and start at level 1, your source of items are raids and vendors only !
Because you just started the game, you don't know the maps so raids are incredibly deadly. This pushes the balance so that most new players will run melee weapon/pistols/cheapest gear for a few dozen raids while they learn maps. This obviously slows down the rate of loot intake before level 10 (this behavior is 100% the result of bad early-game systems design btw).
Effectively, new players are super-gated for items: the only steady source of items is to buy from vendors until you hit level 10, which can take a while.
Fence has an item store that refreshes when re-opened* but it appears that the store is not reserved only for the player browsing it!
Effectively, if you luck-out and find an item upgrade in Fence store, you cannot buy it because "The item is already sold" / Error 513 will always happen for the few desirable items among all the junk. I've personally had sequences of 6+ Error 513 IN A ROW!
The current early-game loot system is therefore designed in an anti-fun way for players until they reach level 10: you are teased with items that you cannot obtain even if you have the funds and they are offered to you!
This should be addressed before the game makes it to release, otherwise from my discussions with other players the consensus seems to be that it could be a big enough deal-breaker to make someone stop playing entirely before they reach level 10 and the game opens up to its full potential.
*Also, this refresh-on-reopen means that a bad person could write a Bot that does nothing but refresh the store and snatches desired items off of a user-defined shopping list, causing even more harm to level 1-10 players.
