Cheers Numeeja,
I actually had a think about it though and I might suggest losing the search function and just having each county as a page (on the sidebar), then each town in a county as a drop down sub page and having each merchant as a link inside the subpage.
When you click on the link it would open a new page for each merchant which they can log in to edit. Each merchant page could have a contact form then. What do you think?
Also how would I create a drop down for the sub pages in the sidebar?
Thanks