Vlookup is very particular in its method. You must be searching for an item in a range of cells and tell it to return you the info in the selected column of the range.

Vlookup does not deal well with duplicates in ranges, it will return the first value it finds.

An example that might help you is: (where a2 refers to the equipment name and price_list refers to your table with cost data, and column 5 contains the cost amount you are looking for)

=vlookup(a2, price_list,5,false)

note that the spelling of equipment in A2 must match the spelling the equipment in the table for this to work.