It's to represent the small number of items settlements have over that settlements base value, so that the kingdom rules can actually match the existing settlement rules.
Otherwise, it's just a way to possibly purchase an item which "might" be useful for your party or for a settlement, but would otherwise be too expensive.
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What I see happening is all the slots get filled up with random things of marginal value and then just sit there full and that is the end of that. Seems like a missed opportunity.
The idea is that the PCs can't go anywhere else to shop. When I played in Kingdom Maker, those were the only items avaliable, so if we didn't like what had been rolled, we had to buy it anyway just to free up new slots.
Usually, this meant us buying lots and lots of scrolls, since they are both the most common loot roll and cheapest to buy with regular gold.
The result was actually kinda neat. While the enemies reliably dropped the Big Six, the shops rarely had them, so the party had lots of very strange items on them by the end. As a player, I didn't mind the mechanic at all - while it could be frustrating to roll a particularly s~!+ty item, it made it all the more exciting to open up a new set of item slots. Much of our town construction was based on improving what items we could get. It became part of the strategy of the game.
So yeah, having been a player in a game where we could only buy from those item slot and nowhere else, I recommend that being the rule. Don't let the PCs shop elsewhere - it makes the game more fun and unique.
Plus, when the PCs finally get to a metropolis where they can shop for basically anything (in the 5th adventure), it feels more special if they haven't had that option previously. At that point, the game shifts away from city building towards army building anyway, so the novelty doesn't matter at that point.