Who can submit a shop to this directory?
Anyone, this site's submission form is explicitly open to shop owners and to regular customers or fans who simply think a shop deserves to be listed, you do not need any official relationship with the business to tell us about it.
What information should I have ready before submitting?
The shop's name, barangay, and street address are the essentials. Beyond that, a founding story, best-selling items, the year it opened, and links to its Google Maps listing, website, Instagram, or Facebook page all genuinely help, the more detail you provide, the faster and more confidently we can verify and activate the listing. None of this needs to be perfectly polished, rough, honest detail is more useful than a vague, generic submission. Frecelynne's Marikina cafe roundup is a good model for the kind of specifics that make a shop easy to write up.
Does submitting a shop guarantee it gets listed?
No, every submission goes through the same review this directory applies to every shop already listed, it has to be genuinely independent rather than a chain or franchise branch, and it has to operate from one or two locations, not more, covered fully in our full directory guide. A submission that does not meet these rules will not go live, though we would still rather receive it and make that call ourselves than have a real shop stay invisible because nobody told us about it.
What's the difference between adding a shop and asking for it to be featured?
Adding a shop gets it listed in the general directory, grouped by barangay and ranked by real visitor reviews over time. Asking to be featured is a separate, additional request for a deeper, written spotlight in our monthly Featured Coffee Shop write-up, open to shops already in the directory or not yet listed, and handled through its own separate request process rather than the general shop submission form.
How long does it take to hear back?
We read submissions by hand rather than auto-publishing them, since every shop goes through the same independence and location-count checks described above, so it is not instant. If you have not seen a shop appear after a reasonable stretch of time, that likely means it is either still being verified or did not clear one of the two listing rules, not that it was ignored.