What is the Product type in Schema.org (product schema)?

When someone searches for "product schema", they want to know what goes in the structured data of a product page, and the answer starts with a type: Product, from Schema.org. It is not the product in your platform or a row in your product feed; it is the markup node that tells a search engine which item is on the page. Its name is a vocabulary term, not a plain word. It matters because it is the first thing Google reads to decide whether your product page can qualify for rich results, with its price, availability or ratings.

How it works

Schema.org defines Product as any product or service that is offered, and gives examples as different as a pair of shoes, a concert ticket, a car rental or a haircut. It hangs directly from Thing, the root type.⁠^{[1]Schema.org. Product} Its properties fall into four families a store recognizes right away:

• Identity: name, description, image and brand.
• Identifiers: sku (the store's reference number), and the standard codes such as gtin, gtin13 or mpn. They have their own entries: SKU, GTIN and MPN.
• Features: color, material or size, among many others.
• Relationships: offers, which leads to the offer with the price; aggregateRating and review, for ratings; isVariantOf and inProductGroupWithID, for variants; and hasMerchantReturnPolicy, for the return policy.⁠^{[1]Schema.org. Product}

The offers property is what separates what the item is from the terms on which it is sold: Schema.org describes it as an offer to provide the item, for example to sell it, rent it or give away tickets.⁠^{[1]Schema.org. Product} The price, the currency and the availability live in that offer, the Offer type, not in the product.

Google uses Product for two different experiences. Product snippets are for pages where you cannot buy directly, such as an editorial review, and let you detail the rating with pros and cons. Merchant listings are for pages where the customer buys from you, and they allow more detail, such as clothing sizes, shipping and returns.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. Introduction to Product structured data} What each one requires at minimum is not the same:

A product with sizes or colors is not described as a single node. Google asks for a ProductGroup that groups the variants, with hasVariant for each one, variesBy for what changes between them (the size or the color) and productGroupID for the reference of the parent product. Each variant is a Product with its own offer, and each one needs a unique identifier, such as sku or gtin.⁠^{[5]Google Search Central. Product variant (ProductGroup, Product) structured data}

And one recommendation that changes the strategy: Google says that providing structured data on the page and also a feed in Google Merchant Center maximizes your chances of showing up and helps it understand and verify the data.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. Introduction to Product structured data}

In a store

Every property of the node has to be something you can point at on the page. Fictional example: a linen shirt from a made-up store, with what the page shows and where it goes in the node.

The last row is the one most argued about. If the page shows no ratings, the node carries none: Google asks you not to mark up content the reader cannot see and for the data to be a faithful representation of the page.⁠^{[6]Google Search Central. General structured data guidelines} It is the same rule Clione follows: the ratings it adds to the Product node come from the store's own reviews, and a product with no reviews gets none.

How to check it

1. Run the URL of a product page through the Rich Results Test. It tells you which kinds of rich result it finds and with what errors or suggestions.⁠^{[7]Search Console Help. Rich Results Test}
2. Look in the node for the three required properties of a merchant listing: name, image and offers.⁠^{[4]Google Search Central. Merchant listing (Product, Offer) structured data}
3. Point to each property on the visible page. One you cannot find on screen is either surplus or missing from the page.⁠^{[6]Google Search Central. General structured data guidelines}
4. If the product has variants, check that each one has its own sku or gtin and that it is not repeated between sizes or colors.⁠^{[5]Google Search Central. Product variant (ProductGroup, Product) structured data}

Related concept: Offer

Product and Offer get confused because they travel together, but they answer different questions. Product says what the item is; Offer says on what terms it is sold: the price, the currency, the availability. Schema.org defines the offer as an offer to transfer some rights to an item or to provide a service, for example selling tickets or renting a movie.⁠^{[8]Schema.org. Offer} For merchant listings Google requires that the offer be yours: the merchant has to be the one selling the product.⁠^{[4]Google Search Central. Merchant listing (Product, Offer) structured data}

To keep going, the structured data reading path puts the other terms in order, and the guide to auditing the structured data of a product page walks through a product page property by property.