Advice for wine merchants and wineries

Following are some advice for wine merchants that we believe will be valuable in returning best sales results from your listing with us.

Wine-Searcher's guidelines:

• Ensure all the wines you stock are listed. Wine-Searcher's software can pick up wine lists directly from most Web sites. Where we are unable to do this, we will contact you directly and you will need to prepare a data feed for us to use. If you are preparing a price list especially for Wine-Searcher, please use this format.

• Completely described wines (including maker's name, vintage, appellation, etc.) receive more referrals as they are more often found by customers.

• Wines priced by the bottle show before those priced by the case, and are noticed more.

• We expect you to be able to sell a wine at the price you state on your list. Please make sure that your list is as accurate as possible as we do remove merchants with out-of-date lists.

• Make sure that the contact information we display for you is accurate - this includes your telephone and fax numbers as well as your email address. Notify us of any changes by either emailing us or completing the contact form again. Please note that we do describe your responsiveness to emails and the accuracy of your listing. We assess this by using a 'Mystery Shopper'. If you feel that the assessment we have made is inaccurate, do contact us.

• Ensure your wines always display in the free-for-use part of the site by sponsoring Wine-Searcher. For further details, see the sponsor's page.

We have been asked by merchants to give advice on web site design. Here are some suggestions based on our experiences.