So your company is deliberately trying to frustrate the market, and doesn't like the result of third parties attempting to help market efficiency?
No. First, we as a middleman resseller MUST provide custom prices, at least to a certain degree. Consider that it's typical for manufacturers to offer different prices to, e.g., schools. This is reflected by offering to us (the middleman) a lower cost, which we pass on to applicable customers. Further, the costs and prices vary similarly from one country to another. Less obviously, many manufacturers (e.g., Microsoft, Adobe, HP) offer licensing programs that entitle those enrolled to purchase their products at a lower cost. So if nothing else, the business terms of the manufacturers whose products we sell necessitates a certain degree of custom pricing.
Second, it seems strange to characterize as "frustrating the market" what we're doing when we cooperate with customers who want to structure their expenses in different ways - say, getting a better deal on expensive products that can be classified as "capital expenses" while allowing us to recover some of that revenue by charging them somewhat more for the products that they'd classify as operational expenses.
You're just describing a cooperative effort to obfuscate pricing and frustrate a market. So sure, your company could be blameless and the manufacturers are solely responsible for undermining price signals. I've still described the overall dynamic that your company is participating in. It's effectively based around closed world assumptions of information control, and so it's not surprising that it conflicts with open world ethos like web scraping.
> it seems strange to characterize as "frustrating the market" what we're doing when we cooperate with customers who want to structure their expenses in different ways
I'm characterizing the overall dynamic of keeping market price discovery from working as effectively. How you may be helping customers in other ways is irrelevant.
The majority of tax and other civil laws are basically full of things that are illegal/problematic if you do them individually, but if you can find someone else to cooperate with then it becomes fine.
No. First, we as a middleman resseller MUST provide custom prices, at least to a certain degree. Consider that it's typical for manufacturers to offer different prices to, e.g., schools. This is reflected by offering to us (the middleman) a lower cost, which we pass on to applicable customers. Further, the costs and prices vary similarly from one country to another. Less obviously, many manufacturers (e.g., Microsoft, Adobe, HP) offer licensing programs that entitle those enrolled to purchase their products at a lower cost. So if nothing else, the business terms of the manufacturers whose products we sell necessitates a certain degree of custom pricing.
Second, it seems strange to characterize as "frustrating the market" what we're doing when we cooperate with customers who want to structure their expenses in different ways - say, getting a better deal on expensive products that can be classified as "capital expenses" while allowing us to recover some of that revenue by charging them somewhat more for the products that they'd classify as operational expenses.