Your price list is a spreadsheet, and that is costing you listings

There is a specific moment where a wine stops being a wine and becomes a row in a database. It happens on the importer’s side, usually in a spreadsheet, usually weeks after your tasting, and usually while they have four other producers’ lists open in adjacent tabs.

Everything about your price list either helps that moment or gets in its way. Most price lists get in its way.

What happens to the file you send

The buyer’s job is to turn your document into rows in their ERP or their offer sheet. Each row needs a reference, a name, a format, a price, a currency and a delivery term, and their system will refuse the row if any of those is missing.

So they read your PDF, retype what they can, and start a list of questions. Every question is a reply-and-wait cycle of a day or two. Four questions is a week, and a week is long enough for a competing producer whose list loaded cleanly to take the shelf space.

The goal is not a prettier document. It is a document that survives being turned into data.

One row per sellable unit

The single biggest structural fix. A “wine” is not what gets sold — a format of a wine of a vintage is. If your Reserva exists in 0.75 and in magnum, that is two rows, with two prices, two EANs and two case configurations.

Lists that give one row per wine and put formats in a note are the ones that generate the most back-and-forth, because the buyer has to invent the missing rows and guess at the missing data.

The fields a buyer cannot proceed without

• Your product reference. A stable code you own, that does not change when the name is re-styled. It is how you and the buyer will refer to the same wine in two years.
• Full name and vintage, spelled exactly as on the label — not the internal shorthand your team uses.
• Format, as a volume in millilitres or litres, not “standard”.
• EAN for the bottle, and for the case if you have one.
• Price, per bottle or per case, and say explicitly which.
• Currency, written out. A bare 12,50 is a guess.
• Incoterm and place — EXW your cellar and DAP their warehouse are very different offers, and a list without one invites a wrong comparison.
• Minimum order quantity, if you have one.
• Validity period. Dates, not “current”.
• Customs code, which saves them a lookup they will otherwise ask you for.

Add availability if you can — the number of bottles you actually have. Buyers plan around allocation, and a list that quietly includes a sold-out wine costs more goodwill than an empty line would.

The formatting habits that make a list unloadable

Merged cells. A merged cell is a visual decision that destroys the row structure. It looks tidy and it makes an import fail.

Prices as text. € 12,50 /bt in a single cell has to be cleaned before it can be summed. Put the number in its own column and the currency in the header.

A decorative header block. Five rows of logo and address above the table means the column names are not on row one. Every buyer’s import tool then needs manual help.

Two names for the same wine. The list says Reserva Tinto, the technical sheet says Reserva Red, the label says Reserva. Three names is three rows in someone’s database, and it will be your reconciliation problem eventually.

Notes that carry pricing logic. “10% discount above 300 bottles, ex-cellar, excluding Nordics” belongs in a structured column or a separate agreement, not in a footnote that gets lost on the way into the ERP.

Per market, not per planet

Producers often try to write one list covering every market, held together with footnotes. It never survives contact with a buyer, because the buyer only cares about their own line — and the footnotes are exactly where mistakes hide.

One list per market, generated from the same underlying product data, is more files but far less risk: a French importer sees EUR and their incoterm, a UK buyer sees GBP and theirs, and no one has to work out which footnote applies to them.

The version problem nobody solves with attachments

A price list is a snapshot. The moment it leaves your outbox it starts ageing, and you have no idea which copy anyone is quoting from. Producers with a dozen active buyers usually have a dozen different versions of the truth in circulation and no way to tell which.

There are only two real answers. Either your list carries a hard validity period and you re-send when it expires — the discipline version — or the buyer reads a list you keep current, and the question of which copy they hold never arises.

The second is what Drinksbase Connect is for: you maintain the product data and the prices, you share a list with a specific importer, and what they see is what you currently sell at what you currently charge. When you change a price, their copy changes with it, because there is no copy.

Before you send the next one

• One row per sellable unit — wine, vintage, format.
• A stable product reference in the first column.
• Currency, incoterm and validity stated explicitly, not implied.
• Numbers in number cells; no merged cells; column names on row one.
• Names matching the label, and matching your technical sheets.
• One list per market, not one list with footnotes.
• A named contact for questions — and an expectation that there will be fewer of them.