What are Google's merchant listings?

Merchant listings are not your product page, the page on your store where people buy, or your Google Merchant Center account. They are what Google builds from that page when it shows it in its results: the product with its price, whether it is in stock, what shipping costs and what happens if you return it. Google calls them merchant listings, or merchant listing experiences, in its documentation.⁠^{[1]Google Search Central. Merchant listing (Product, Offer) structured data} For a store they matter for a direct reason: they are the Google result that looks most like a shop window, and you become eligible from the page itself, with structured data.

How it works

Where they appear. According to Google, when you add Product markup to your page, it can be eligible for merchant listing experiences on Google Search: the shopping knowledge panel, Google Images, popular product results and product snippets. These listings can highlight specific product data, such as price, availability and shipping and return information.⁠^{[1]Google Search Central. Merchant listing (Product, Offer) structured data} They are, in other words, a family of rich results built around buying.

Which pages are eligible. Only pages where the shopper can buy the product, not pages that link to other sites that sell it.⁠^{[1]Google Search Central. Merchant listing (Product, Offer) structured data} A review page or a comparison site does not qualify here, even with the same markup. Google splits the two cases into two types of product data: product snippets, for pages where you cannot buy directly, with more options to describe reviews, and merchant listings, for pages where the customer buys from you, with more options to detail the product, such as clothing sizes, shipping and the return policy.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. Introduction to Product structured data}

What markup they need. The minimum is short. The Product needs a name (name), an image (image) and an offer (offers). The offer, of the Offer type, needs the price (price) and the currency (priceCurrency, in ISO 4217 format). And one difference worth reading twice: unlike product snippets, merchant listings require a price greater than zero.⁠^{[1]Google Search Central. Merchant listing (Product, Offer) structured data} Beyond that, Google recommends adding shipping (shippingDetails), the return policy (hasMerchantReturnPolicy), the average rating, the brand, the GTIN, the description and the SKU.⁠^{[1]Google Search Central. Merchant listing (Product, Offer) structured data}

Shipping and returns, best declared once for the whole store. Google recommends declaring the shipping and return policies globally, in the company's Organization markup, and using the offer's properties only when some products have a different policy that overrides the general one.⁠^{[1]Google Search Central. Merchant listing (Product, Offer) structured data} The detail of each is in OfferShippingDetails and MerchantReturnPolicy.

Variants. Product results only support pages that focus on a single product or on several variants of the same product.⁠^{[1]Google Search Central. Merchant listing (Product, Offer) structured data} A category page with twenty different backpacks is not a merchant listing; the page for one backpack in three colors can be.

The relationship with Merchant Center. Merchant listings do not require a Merchant Center account: you become eligible with the page's markup. But Google recommends both routes at once, because giving structured data on the page and a Merchant Center feed maximizes the experiences you are eligible for and helps it understand and verify your data.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. Introduction to Product structured data} Merchant Center's free listings are a different program, with their own requirements: an active account, compliance with its policies and the return policy published on the site. With them, products can show up in Search, the Shopping tab, Images and Lens, YouTube, Maps and Gemini.⁠^{[3]Google Merchant Center Help. Free listings for products}

Where Google measures it. When Google identifies your site as an online store, because it exists mainly to sell physical products or because it has product structured data, Search Console shows a Shopping section. Inside is the merchant listings report, which collects the markup of this type that Google has found on your site. Google describes these listings as richer results that always include a price and that can appear in a carousel of similar products from different sellers.⁠^{[4]Search Console Help. Shopping reports and tools}

In a store

A fictional example: a backpack's product page in an invented mountain-gear store, with the minimum markup Google asks for and two recommended properties. Shipping and returns are not here because the store declares them once in its Organization markup, as Google recommends.⁠^{[1]Google Search Central. Merchant listing (Product, Offer) structured data}

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Product",
  "name": "Cumbre 20 L waterproof urban backpack",
  "image": "https://cumbre-store.example/img/cumbre-backpack-20.jpg",
  "sku": "CUM-20-BLK",
  "brand": { "@type": "Brand", "name": "Cumbre" },
  "offers": {
    "@type": "Offer",
    "price": 59.9,
    "priceCurrency": "USD",
    "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock",
    "url": "https://cumbre-store.example/cumbre-urban-backpack-20"
  }
}

What decides whether this page is eligible, field by field:

Source for each row: Google's documentation on merchant listings.⁠^{[1]Google Search Central. Merchant listing (Product, Offer) structured data}

How to check it

1. Run a published page through the Rich Results Test and see whether it detects the merchant listing element and with which errors. Google recommends validating your code this way and fixing critical errors.⁠^{[1]Google Search Central. Merchant listing (Product, Offer) structured data}
2. Inspect the same URL in Search Console to see how Google sees it once published, which is what Google advises doing with a few pages before rolling the markup out to the rest.⁠^{[1]Google Search Central. Merchant listing (Product, Offer) structured data}
3. Open the Shopping section of Search Console, if you have it, and the merchant listings report: it says which pages have valid markup and which fail.⁠^{[4]Search Console Help. Shopping reports and tools}
4. Look for pages with a zero price or no price in the markup, and pages that link to another store instead of selling: neither is eligible.⁠^{[1]Google Search Central. Merchant listing (Product, Offer) structured data}
5. Check where you declare shipping and returns. If it is on every offer and not in Organization, make sure it says the same across the whole catalog. If you have Merchant Center linked, Search Console also lets you manage those settings in its Shopping configuration.⁠^{[4]Search Console Help. Shopping reports and tools}

Related concept: product snippets

Product snippets use the same Product markup, but they are meant for pages where you cannot buy directly, such as a review or a comparison, and mostly show the rating and price as a visual enhancement of the result.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. Introduction to Product structured data}⁠^{[4]Search Console Help. Shopping reports and tools} Merchant listings are for the page that sells: they require a price greater than zero and accept more purchase detail.⁠^{[1]Google Search Central. Merchant listing (Product, Offer) structured data} Both are rich results, and Search Console counts them in two different reports.⁠^{[4]Search Console Help. Shopping reports and tools} A well-marked-up product page can be eligible for both; a review page, only for the first.

To go further, the structured data reading path orders the rest of the terms, starting with the JSON-LD markup all of this is written in.