The Alaba International market, a hub for electronics, electrical goods, ICT products, and allied businesses, is a significant commercial hub. With over 5,000 registered enterprises and 100,000 dealers (Awoniyi, 2016) supported by a strong apprenticeship incubator scheme (The Igbo Business School Scheme), the market attracts many business visitors from West Africa and beyond. However, the market's alleged lack of acceptable business ethics, etiquettes, and corporate governance standards impacts government revenue generation and socioeconomic development. Therefore, a shift from a tradership mindset to an entrepreneurial mindset is crucial, as trading proficiency doesn't necessarily translate to entrepreneurship proficiency. Trading skills and entrepreneurship abilities are distinct, and their outcomes also vary. As a result, this study, adopting the Narrative-Textual Case Study methodology (NTCS), employs Hagen's Social Change theory to suggest that proactive traders and their apprentices can systematically become entrepreneurial by acquiring some requisite entrepreneurial knowledge and adjusting their tradership mindset, while retaining some good aspects of tradership that agree with entrepreneurship. This will extricate them from the toga of merchants of fake and cheap products to a respectable position in the entrepreneurship cadre. Hence, the need for a transition from a trader mindset to an entrepreneurial mindset is hereby advocated. Besides emphasizing the acquisition of requisite skills and social capitals for value creation for the purposes of wealth creation, multiplication, distribution, diversification, preservation, and perpetuation, this transmutation should also be driven by the enhancement of human skills and competencies. The study deliberately delved into various variables, including challenges in the Alaba International Market ecosystem, and submits that there is need for both LGA and State government authorities to create an enabling business environment to promote entrepreneurship transition. This, ultimately, would promote quality products and services, fair competition, transparency, better customer relations, rule of law, human rights, inclusivity, ethical behavior, environmental conservation, and adaptive learning that can endanger socioeconomic development in Nigeria.