← My Next Wine

Merchant Terms

Version 2026-08-09-1 · Last updated 9 August 2026

These business-to-business terms govern the WooCommerce merchant's use of the My Next Wine plugin and connected recommendation service (the Service) supplied by Greg Bowe trading as MyNextWine (the Supplier). The person connecting the store confirms that they are authorised to bind the merchant. The terms are accepted through the explicit connection control in WooCommerce administration before store data is sent to My Next Wine.

These terms apply to business merchants wherever they are established, but only where the Supplier, the merchant's hosting and relevant service providers make the Service available. The merchant confirms that it obtains the Service wholly or mainly for its trade or business and not as a consumer. Availability of the Service in a country does not represent that the Service, the merchant's store or the sale or delivery of alcohol complies with that country's laws.

1. Technology service only

The Supplier provides catalogue-connection, mapping, recommendation, storefront-widget, analytics and order-attribution technology. It is not the seller, reseller, distributor, importer, producer, packer, warehouse operator, delivery carrier, payment provider or alcohol-license holder for wine sold through the merchant's store. It does not possess wine, set the merchant's retail prices or take the customer's wine payment.

Each wine sale is solely between the merchant and its customer. The merchant is the seller of record and is solely responsible for checkout, payment, taxes, age verification, fulfilment, delivery, customer service, cancellations, refunds, returns and consumer-law compliance. Nothing creates agency, partnership, franchise, employment or a joint venture.

2. Wine quality, defects and product claims

The merchant is solely responsible for product identity, title, authenticity, provenance, vintage, producer, descriptions, images, price, stock, alcohol content, allergens, labelling, packaging, storage, condition, merchantability, fitness, safety and legal compliance. The Supplier does not inspect, handle, store, ship or test wine and gives no warranty about quality or freedom from cork taint, oxidation, heat damage, breakage, shortage, substitution, misdescription, recall or other defect.

All product complaints, statutory remedies, guarantees, refunds, replacements, recalls and claims arising from a wine or its delivery must be handled by the merchant, except to the extent directly caused by the Supplier's breach.

3. Catalogue mapping and recommendations

The Service associates the merchant's product and variation records with wines in the Supplier's database using automated and manual catalogue-mapping processes. Product titles, descriptions, images and identifiers may be incomplete, inconsistent or ambiguous, and a product may therefore be associated with the wrong wine, producer, vintage, region, grape, style, colour, bottle size or other attribute. The Supplier will use reasonable skill and care in operating and reviewing the mapping process but does not warrant that every association is complete or error-free. The merchant must reasonably spot-check the widget and sample recommendations, promptly report suspected errors and provide clarifying product information when requested. The Supplier may correct, suspend or remove a mapping while it is reviewed.

Recommendations are automated and may be AI-assisted. They use shopper answers, merchant catalogue data, mapped wine information, prices and reported availability. Wine appreciation and food pairing are subjective. A recommendation is guidance only, not an endorsement, certification, guarantee of customer satisfaction, or medical, nutritional, allergy, legal or professional advice.

The merchant must not represent a recommendation as a guarantee. The Supplier is not liable merely because a shopper dislikes a recommended wine, considers another wine or pairing preferable, or is otherwise dissatisfied with a matter of personal taste. Prices and stock may change between recommendation, basket and checkout, and WooCommerce must perform final product, variation, quantity, price, tax, delivery and stock validation. The Supplier does not guarantee any impression, engagement, basket addition, completed checkout, sale, conversion rate, average order value, customer retention, revenue, profit, search ranking or other commercial outcome. The merchant remains responsible for testing the plugin with its theme and extensions, monitoring its effect, choosing its placement and promptly disabling it if the merchant reasonably believes it is harming the storefront or customers.

4. Merchant obligations

5. External service and merchant data

The plugin is a connector to the externally hosted My Next Wine Service. It sends the disclosed store/account details and catalogue data only after an authorised administrator expressly connects the store. The merchant retains ownership of its content and grants the Supplier a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence during the Service term to access, copy, normalise, map, transform, display and process it as reasonably necessary to provide, secure, support and improve the Service.

As between the parties, the merchant owns and controls its customer accounts, customer lists, leads, customer relationships and associated goodwill. The Supplier acquires no ownership interest in them merely by providing the Service. The Supplier will not use Wine Finder preference inputs to market wine directly to shoppers or create a reusable direct-to-consumer marketing profile, except where a shopper separately and directly uses or opts into a distinct My Next Wine B2C service under separate Irish B2C terms and privacy disclosures.

6. Data protection

6.1 Roles

The merchant is normally controller of shopper and customer data. The Supplier acts as processor for shopper preference inputs, attributed order references and similar data processed solely to provide the Service on the merchant's instructions. The Supplier is an independent controller for merchant account administration, billing, security, fraud prevention, legal compliance and its own business records.

6.2 Processor terms

Processor activities cover operation of the Wine Finder during the Service term and secure deletion/retention periods. Data subjects may include merchant users and shoppers; data may include store identifiers, technical request information, preference inputs, order references and selected products. The Supplier will process only on documented instructions, bind personnel to confidentiality, use appropriate security, impose equivalent duties on subprocessors, assist reasonably with rights requests and compliance, notify relevant breaches without undue delay, and delete or return processor data on termination except where lawful retention is required.

The merchant generally authorises subprocessors for hosting, databases, monitoring, support and AI-assisted recommendation generation. The Supplier will give reasonable advance notice of a material new subprocessor through the plugin, published subprocessor list, email or another reasonable channel. The merchant may object on reasonable data-protection grounds before the notified appointment; the parties will work in good faith on a reasonable solution, and if none is available the merchant may terminate the affected Service. Required international-transfer safeguards will be used. Proportionate compliance information and audits are available subject to confidentiality, security, reasonable notice and cost controls.

The merchant will provide only lawful instructions, maintain an applicable legal basis, give required privacy and AI notices, respond to data-subject requests, and avoid requesting or submitting special-category, sensitive or customer-identifying information through free-text preference fields. Non-essential storefront analytics are disabled by default. Where the site exposes the WordPress Consent API, analytics are sent only when the merchant enables them and the site reports positive statistics consent. Where that API is unavailable, enabling analytics confirms that the merchant has implemented another lawful consent or privacy basis and any notices required in the shopper's jurisdiction. The merchant remains responsible for determining whether the Service is lawful and appropriately configured in every market in which it is deployed.

Where US state privacy law applies and the Supplier processes personal information for the merchant, the Supplier acts as the merchant's service provider/processor for the specific business purposes described in these terms. The Supplier will not sell or share that personal information, use it for cross-context behavioural advertising, retain/use/disclose it outside those purposes or the parties' direct business relationship, or combine it with personal information received from another source except as legally permitted for a service provider/processor. The Supplier will provide the level of privacy protection required of a service provider/processor, make reasonable compliance information available, and permit proportionate monitoring or assessment subject to confidentiality and security controls. The Supplier will notify the merchant if it determines it can no longer meet these restrictions, and the merchant may take reasonable steps to stop and remediate unauthorised use.

7. Trial, charges and taxes

Unless otherwise agreed in writing, the Service includes a 14-day free trial that starts only when the merchant completes the Stripe-hosted subscription checkout from WooCommerce administration after catalogue readiness. The standard recurring fee after the trial is EUR 29.99 each month, plus applicable taxes shown during checkout or on the invoice.

Plugin activation, connection and catalogue mapping do not themselves authorise a payment. Stripe hosts checkout and may process payment authentication, recurring renewals, payment retries and invoices. Payment-card details are submitted directly to Stripe and are not handled by the WordPress plugin or stored by the Supplier. The Supplier activates or continues access only from verified Stripe billing events. A failed renewal may pause the Service. Refund requests are handled by the Supplier and any approved refund or cancellation may affect access according to the Stripe subscription state.

8. Open-source plugin and Service rights

Plugin files distributed under the GNU General Public License remain governed by that licence. The GPL does not grant rights to the externally hosted Service, recommendation models, databases, mappings, brand assets or non-distributed backend software. The Supplier and its licensors retain those rights. An active entitlement gives the merchant a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access the connected Service for the registered store.

9. Service levels, catalogue freshness, compatibility and marketplaces

9.1 Service-level targets

For the paid Service, the Supplier will use commercially reasonable efforts to meet the following targets in each calendar month: (a) the recommendation API will be available at least 95.0% of the time; and (b) at least 95% of valid recommendation requests permitted by section 11 will receive a completed success or error response in less than 30 seconds. Response time is measured from receipt of the request at the Supplier's service boundary until the response leaves that boundary. It does not include the shopper's device or connection, the merchant's site or hosting, WordPress or WooCommerce processing, or the public internet outside the Supplier's control.

Availability is calculated in Coordinated Universal Time from the Supplier's server logs and monitoring for periods when the merchant has an active entitlement and a ready catalogue. A period is unavailable when the recommendation API cannot accept a valid permitted request or repeatedly returns a server error or timeout. The calculation excludes notified planned maintenance, urgent security maintenance, suspension permitted by these terms, merchant configuration or data faults, merchant hosting or site failures, internet failures outside the Supplier's network, and force-majeure events. These are service targets rather than a guarantee of uninterrupted operation and do not create automatic service credits.

9.2 Catalogue-freshness targets

Subject to a successful authorised catalogue connection, the Supplier will use commercially reasonable efforts to reflect a product becoming unavailable within 6 hours after WooCommerce has accurately recorded the change and the connected plugin has successfully sent it to the Service. The Supplier will use commercially reasonable efforts to make a new published, purchasable and otherwise eligible wine available for recommendation within 48 hours after it is first received by the Service, where the product can be mapped with reasonable confidence from the supplied information. A new product that is ambiguous, incomplete, unsupported, not actually a wine or requires merchant clarification may remain unavailable until review is completed. The merchant's WooCommerce product record, basket and checkout remain authoritative at all times.

The plugin requests synchronisation after relevant product or stock changes and schedules a periodic reconciliation, but WordPress scheduled tasks can depend on site traffic and hosting configuration. The catalogue-freshness targets do not apply while the plugin, credentials, permissions, scheduled tasks, background processing, outbound HTTPS, the merchant's site or the store connection are invalid, disabled or unavailable; while merchant data is inaccurate or incomplete; during service rate limiting or an excluded availability event; or to a change that the plugin has not successfully delivered to the Service. The merchant must monitor the plugin's last-sync status, use a reliable system cron or equivalent where needed, and report a suspected stale or incorrect mapping promptly. A delayed or failed catalogue update does not transfer responsibility for the wine sale, stock control or fulfilment to the Supplier.

9.3 Compatibility, marketplaces and Service changes

The Service is provided on a commercially reasonable, as-available basis. No uninterrupted, error-free or universal compatibility is promised. Themes, caching, hosting, security products, extensions, bundles, composites, subscriptions, backorders, multicurrency systems and third-party outages may affect operation and may require separate compatibility work.

Automattic, WooCommerce, WordPress.org, WordPress hosts and extension marketplaces are independent third parties and are not parties to these terms. The Supplier does not guarantee initial or continuing marketplace approval, listing, ranking, review outcome, compatibility testing, repository access, billing availability or platform availability. A platform or marketplace may change requirements, reject or remove the plugin, restrict an account or discontinue functionality. Such action is not a Supplier breach unless directly caused by the Supplier's material breach of these terms. The merchant must comply with applicable WooCommerce, WordPress, hosting, marketplace and extension terms.

The Supplier may modify the Service for legal, security, technical or product reasons and will give reasonable notice before materially removing paid core functionality where practical.

10. Cancellation, revocation and termination

The merchant may disable the widget or open Stripe Customer Portal from WooCommerce administration to manage or cancel the recurring plan. Cancellation normally prevents future renewal while preserving access until the end of the current paid period reported by Stripe. Disabling, deactivating or uninstalling the plugin does not by itself cancel the Stripe subscription. Uninstall sends a best-effort signed service revocation and removes local credentials, but billing records and limited legal/accounting records may remain as described in the Privacy Statement. The Supplier may suspend or terminate for non-payment, security risk, unlawful use, material breach or harm to customers or the Service, with notice and an opportunity to remedy where practical.

11. Acceptable use, Fair Usage Policy and confidentiality

The merchant must not bypass billing or security, overload or scrape the Service, introduce malicious code, resell hosted access, interfere with another merchant, use recommendations unlawfully or deceptively, or infringe rights. Each party must protect the other's non-public business and technical information and use it only for this relationship, subject to normal exceptions for public, independently developed, previously known or legally compelled information.

11.1 Fair Usage Policy

The plan is designed for ordinary interactive use by shoppers on one connected WooCommerce store. The current technical limits are: no more than 5 recommendation requests per technical client identifier in any 5-minute control window, 100 recommendation requests per store per hour and 750 per store per day; and no more than 15 wine-swap requests per technical client identifier in any 5-minute control window, 300 swap requests per store per hour and 2,000 per store per day. The first limit reached applies. Retries count as new requests. Initial store-connection attempts are limited to 8 per combined technical source and site in any one-hour control window. These limits do not create a guaranteed request allocation and no overage fee is charged.

The Service may return HTTP status 429 with a retry period when a limit is reached. Requests may also be temporarily restricted below those thresholds where reasonably necessary to respond to malicious or automated traffic, protect security or other merchants, comply with law or platform requirements, or manage exceptional shared-service or upstream capacity. The merchant must not rotate identifiers, distribute requests, automate retries or use another method to evade a control. The Supplier may adjust the limits to preserve normal interactive use and service reliability; except for an urgent security, legal or capacity response, reasonable advance notice will be given before a material reduction.

12. Warranties and disclaimer

Each party warrants authority to enter these terms. The Supplier warrants that it will provide the Service with reasonable skill and care. Except for that warranty, the express commitments in these terms and rights that cannot lawfully be excluded, the Service and all recommendations are provided without implied warranties, including warranties of fitness for a particular purpose, merchantability, accuracy, non-infringement, marketplace approval, compatibility, conversion uplift or other commercial outcome.

13. Liability

Nothing excludes liability for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, death or personal injury caused by negligence, wilful misconduct, or liability that cannot legally be excluded. Subject to that, neither party is liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, or loss of profit, revenue, business, anticipated savings, goodwill or data.

Subject to the previous paragraph, the Supplier's total aggregate liability arising from the Service in any 12-month period is limited to the greater of the Service fees paid or payable for that period and €500. Without limiting the excluded-loss wording above, the Supplier is not liable for alleged loss of conversion, basket or checkout completion, average order value, ranking, traffic, attribution, customer relationship, sales or revenue; inaccurate or incomplete merchant catalogue data; an incorrect catalogue association or a recommendation affected by one; subjective dissatisfaction with a wine or pairing; wine defects; stale stock caused by a matter excluded under section 9.2; or WooCommerce, WordPress, host or marketplace review, suspension, removal, billing, compatibility or availability decisions, except to the extent directly caused by the Supplier's breach of its express obligations or failure to exercise reasonable skill and care. The limitations apply to the fullest extent permitted by law and whether claims arise in contract, tort, negligence, statute or otherwise.

14. Merchant indemnity

The merchant will indemnify and defend the Supplier and its personnel against third-party claims, losses, recalls, penalties, damages and reasonable legal costs arising from the merchant's wines, defects, alcohol advertising or sales, licensing, age verification, taxes, fulfilment, delivery, customer terms, store content, infringement, data breach or violation of law, except to the extent directly caused by the Supplier's breach, negligence or wilful misconduct. The Supplier will give prompt notice of an indemnified claim, allow the merchant reasonable control of its defence and settlement, and provide reasonable cooperation at the merchant's cost. The merchant must not settle a claim in a way that admits fault by, imposes non-monetary obligations on, or fails to fully release the Supplier without the Supplier's prior written consent, not to be unreasonably withheld.

15. General

Neither party is liable for events beyond reasonable control. These terms, the Privacy Statement and the accepted billing arrangement are the entire agreement for the Service. The merchant confirms that it has not relied on any promise of sales, conversion uplift, exclusivity, marketplace approval or other commercial result not expressly stated here. Material changes will be notified and may require renewed acceptance. Assignment by the merchant requires consent; the Supplier may assign as part of a reorganisation, financing or sale. Non-enforcement is not waiver, invalid terms are severed or reduced, and the remainder continues. No shopper or other third party may enforce these Merchant Terms. Sections intended by their nature to survive termination, including payment, data protection, confidentiality, intellectual property, disclaimers, liability, indemnity and disputes, survive.

16. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by Irish law regardless of where the merchant is established or uses the Service. The courts of Ireland have exclusive jurisdiction, except that either party may seek urgent injunctive relief in any competent court and mandatory rights or jurisdiction rules that cannot be excluded remain unaffected. Before proceedings, the parties will first try in good faith to resolve the dispute through their nominated business contacts. These terms are written in English; any translation is for convenience and the English version prevails to the extent permitted by applicable law.