Hi Chris and welcome to the forum,
Couple of points to cover there for you, but I'll start with the supplier hidden prices one firstly. This one is one of my pet hates, I don't have any explanation as to why suppliers do it, I really don't, to me it is nothing more than a waste of everyone's time. I don't see the point of making someone complete the application, then have someone process the application, only for nothing in many cases.
I know it's frustrating and something SaleHoo is very conscious of, however trying to convince suppliers to be more open with members up front is akin to having teeth pulled in many cases. Despite us suggesting it would streamline business for everyone involved, that advice is simply ignored in many cases.
So we can keep suggesting it, but in reality it is really down to the supplier to create their own terms and conditions.
To your point regarding a price rating, this is something we've also looked at quite closely, but is far more complicated than you may expect. Here are some issues we face, not everyone uses suppliers to sell on eBay, some for example will buy product to sell at market stalls where profit margin is usually much better than on a site like eBay.
So for those sellers, they would rate the price as good. Then you have an eBay seller trying to compete in a hot market, lets say nobile phones for example. On eBay, this market is full of some very big hitters spending lots of cash to buy in stock at the cheapest possible price and then selling at drastically reduced margins to create market domination.
So someone wanting to deal in that market will look at some of the eBay prices and decide that the supplier is too expensive and rate them lowly. Throw into that mix the possibility of loss leaders playing a roll effecting the market, as well as supplier changing their prices at any given time and it's impossible to get an accurate rating in place.
Rating a service is one thing, but rating something like a price that has so many different factors that effect that price is a nightmare. There just isn't a system that could deliver a fair and balanced assessment of prices unfortunately and it's important to use to be as supportive and fair to our suppliers just as much as we are to our members.