ECommerce and microdata

[ChristopherGlaeser]

Last year I rolled my own online shop and I included schema.org microdata for all the products.  My Google ranking continued to improve during that period, but I was doing a number of improvements, so I can't say how much was due to the microdata.

My store continues to grow so I moved to an eCommerce solution.  I opted to go with Volusion.  Much to my surprise, about the only SEO feature they have implemented is SEO friendly URLs.  They have not implemented microdata, which is pretty surprising given that all their sites are geared towards products.  I would think it would be very easy for them to span the product name, description, price, etc, with a product schema.

I called CoreCommerce, a Volusion competitor, and they have not implemented microdata either.

Why are these large eCommerce providers ignoring microdata?

Are there eCommerce solutions that have implemented microdata?

Do large online retailers like Amazon and Buy use microdata?

Is there any data that shows the SEO benefits of implementing microdata for an online store?

Best,
Christopher

[BenFox]

I don't have answers to all of your questions but I might be able to shed a little light on them.

I've not seen any major studies that show the benefit of microdata specifically on rankings. However when you look at the area of rich snippets for eCommerce as a whole then I have it on good authority (but haven't seen the data myself) that you can expect an increased CTR from having some forms of rich snippet. Whether you implement that change using microdata, microformats or RDFa is irrelevant. Here's one study I found.

I would hazard a guess that many eCommerce providers appear to be a little slow to implement microdata into their product because although Schema.org has been live for over a year microdata has only provided any tangible benefit in Google since April 2012 when Google updated rich snippets for products.

If you want to find out if a specific retail is using semantic data (again not just microdata in this case) then just take their product page URLs and paste them into the rich snippets testing tool.

Hope that helps a little.

[ChristopherGlaeser]

Thanks for the info and the link to the testing tool.

To be fair, I should add that Volusion has added rich snippets for reviews, and that's certainly a step in the right direction.  However, companies rolling out a new shop typically have products and no reviews, so the product snippets could be used from day one if they were implemented.

I did come up with a hack to add a schema.org description to each of my products.  I'll continue to look for a hack that allows me to put meta data around all product features like price and availability, but product description will have to do for now.

Best,
Christopher

[RobertFisher]

Amazon uses Schema with their products. We use product Schema on our eCommerce sites. My belief is that it will help from a rich snippets pov and simply that this is something the search engines want. The best way to get people to adopt is to show that it helps. That's my opinion anyway.

Best,

[adhunna]

Amazing! The question from Christopher was posted in 2012. 2 years later, Volusion still seem to be running years behind as far as online marketing goes. They have a reasonably good system for building an ecommerce website, but when it comes to online marketing, they struggle.

• They have still not implemented Microdata for products.
• Not only that but their Google Shopping Feed has to be Manually published, instead of allowing the feed to get updated periodically, like daily etc.
• They do not support all the latest fields and attribute details that Google Merchant centre now offer such as Mobile Links, Attribute Lengths
• Making Availability mandatory (which was enforced September 30, 2014)
• and so much more.

For Basic ecommerce the Volusion product seems great. As soon as you wish to really start utilising resources outside Volusion, Good Luck!