Google has enhanced its shopping experience by adding structured data support that allows merchants to show variants of their products. This new support comes on the heels of other structured data enhancements, including the support for Products in 2022 and support for shipping and handling in 2023.
The new structured data is said to help merchants show more relevant products to users. In an announcement on its blog, Google said:
Many products are sold in different variations. For example apparel, shoes, furniture, and luggage are sold in various sizes, colors, materials, or patterns. Similarly, electronics products such as laptops or smartphones are sold with different memory sizes, screen sizes, and processors.
Google also states that since sites that use product variants are more complex, the structured data is also complex. Variants must be grouped under a single parent product. To allow this, Google has introduced three new properties that nest under the ProductGroup type:
- hasVariant (to nest Product variants under their parent ProductGroup)
- variesBy (to list the variant-identifying properties)
- productGroupID (the ID, also known as "parent sku" of the ProductGroup)
You can check your structured data validated in Google Search Console by checking the product snippets and merchants listing reports and the rich results test. The Product Variant documentation shows how to add structured data to single-page and multi-page websites.
Once the markups are validated, your product variants are eligible to be displayed in enhanced Google Search results.
