So we lost a guild bid today, however, due to our guild members being proactive we found a spare NPC trader.
BUT would you believe it? ZOS still has bugs the size of elephants in their trading system and we could not hire, despite clicking on the HIRE TRADER option due to the guild page showing we still had a trader, when we'd lost it!
Another bug that we shall probably never see fixed, eh? Is it perhaps a feature of the new CP 2.0 system?