Google discreetly revised its organization’s structured data documentation to clarify two aspects of merchant returns, addressing feedback regarding ambiguities in the previous version.

Organization Structured Data and Merchant Returns

Google recently expanded its Organization’s structured data to accommodate a merchant return policy, enabling support for a sitewide return policy. The update aimed to streamline the process of defining and maintaining general return policies for an entire site. As stated:

“Adding support for Organization-level return policies

What: Added documentation on how to specify a general return policy for an Organization.

Why: This makes it easier to define and maintain general return policies for an entire site.”

However, this update raised questions about the scenario where a site has both a sitewide return policy and individual return policies for specific products.

The recent clarification addresses this specific scenario, explaining how structured data should be handled when both sitewide and product-specific return policies are in use.

What Takes Precedence?

What happens if a merchant uses a sitewide and product-specific return policy in their structured data? Google’s new documentation clarifies that Google will prioritize the more granular product-level policy. The clarification states:

“If you choose to provide both organization-level and product-level return policy markup, Google defaults to the product-level return policy markup.”

Change Reflected Elsewhere

Google has also updated the documentation to address the use of two levels of merchant return policies in a section that discusses whether structured data or Merchant Center data takes precedence. The policy remains unchanged despite the update: Merchant Center data still takes precedence.

This is the old documentation:

“If you choose to use markup and settings in Merchant Center, Google will only use the information provided for any products submitted in your Merchant Center product feeds, including automated feeds.”

The updated section now includes additional wording:

“If you choose to use both markup (whether at the organization-level or product-level, or both) and settings in Merchant Center, Google will only use the information provided in Merchant Center for any products submitted in your Merchant Center product feeds, including automated feeds.”

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