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.
> 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.
They’re trying to pay less tax by convincing your company to put a different price on products they buy based on their tax strategy.
It sounds illegal.
What do you think about their other assertion that the search page is getting a gigantic number of hits that a/ cannot be cached and b/ cannot be rate limited because they're using a botnet?
The scale of the botnet sounds like an awfully determined and entrenched adversary, likely arising because this company has been frustrating the market for quite some time. A good faith API wouldn't make the bots change behavior tomorrow, but they certainly would if there were breaking page format changes containing a comment linking to the API.
So your company is deliberately trying to frustrate the market, and doesn't like the result of third parties attempting to help market efficiency? It seems like this is the exact kind of scraping that we generally want more of! I'm sorry about your personal technical predicament, but it doesn't sound like your perspective is really coming from the moral high ground here.