The default in industrial parts distribution is that you cannot see a price without an account, and often not without a phone call. We went the other way: where a supplier is willing to publish a price, it is on the page, visible to anyone, with no login.
This is not a moral position. It is a bet about what makes a marketplace work, and it is worth setting out the argument on both sides.
The case for hiding prices
It is a real case and people who make it are not being unreasonable.
Prices are negotiated. A distributor's price to a €5 m account is not their price to a one-off buyer, and publishing one number misrepresents both.
Competitors read your prices. In a market of a few hundred specialist dealers, everyone's pricing becomes visible to everyone.
A price without context misleads. The same article number can be new OEM with a manufacturer warranty or a tested-used pull with thirty days. One number next to another number invites a comparison that is not like for like.
Contact is the product. For some distributors the value they add is the conversation — sizing, application, alternatives — and a published price short-circuits it.
Why we publish anyway
Because the buyer's alternative is not "call for a price". It is "search somewhere else". A maintenance engineer at 22:00 with a line down does not fill in a contact form and wait. They go to whichever page shows a number. Hiding the price does not move the negotiation later; it removes you from the shortlist.
Because comparison is the point of a marketplace. A marketplace where you must ask before you can compare is a directory. Directories are useful and we would not have built one.
Because the context can be published too. The objection that "a price without context misleads" is correct, and the answer is to publish the context rather than to hide the price. Every offer here carries its condition, the country it ships from, the lead time, the warranty months where the supplier gives one, and the date the supplier last published it. That is enough context for a comparison to be honest.
Because it is measurable. Lines with a visible price receive substantially more requests than lines without. Suppliers see that in their own numbers within a few weeks of listing.
What we kept from the other side
We did not make publishing compulsory, and we will not.
A supplier can hide the price on any line, and the offer then says "price on request" rather than inventing a number. Quantity can be hidden the same way. Both are legitimate: a dealer with two units of a scarce part has a real reason not to publish, and a supplier whose price genuinely depends on quantity should quote rather than list.
What we do not allow is a price that is not the price. An offer that lists €400 and quotes €700 without a stated reason is a dispute, and disputes are visible on the supplier's own page.
The uncomfortable part
Publishing prices makes the cheapest supplier visible, and the cheapest supplier is not always the right one. A refurbisher with a two-year warranty and a bench is worth more than a dealer selling an untested pull at half the price, and a list sorted by price does not say so.
Our answer is to make the other axes visible on the same card: condition, warranty, country, lead time, verification, rating, response time. Whether buyers use them is up to buyers. But the alternative — keeping everyone in the dark so the good suppliers are not undercut — protects nobody, because the buyer who cannot compare simply buys from whoever they bought from last time.
Where this goes
The same argument applies to everything else we could have made opaque. Lead times are published with their freshness date. Response times are measured rather than claimed. When paid placement exists it will be labelled. When a part is discontinued the page says so, even though "discontinued" is a word that costs us a sale.
A marketplace's only durable asset is that people believe what it says. Every one of those decisions is the same decision.