Mostly experience so you get levels for a chance at higher stat rolls on items. If you see an item in the shop you can get and are just short some gold you can always run a couple of quests just focusing on gold.

Buying stats with gold for each character gets expensive rather fast. So early on that tends to not be the best place to be spending gold on.

With that said. We do have a massive reward week with it being the first week and part of the auction sales along with everyone spending making the rewards extra nice. So there might be an instance where spending 500 gold for a couple of stat points could be the difference between gaining a few ranks in the area.

For the most part, it comes down to luck with what items you end up getting. Some are doing heavy spending with re-rolling the item shop hoping to pull a nice item. If they had higher levels before doing that they would be giving themselves a better chance at higher stats on the items in the shop. They might even be better off just buying any cheap item off other players it's hard to say what would be considered "cheap" atm since i doubt most of those level 1 to 4 items won't have much of a resell value.