Google announced yesterday that you no longer need to use Google Merchant Center to communicate your shipping details in the product search results. Now you can use new shipping detail schema markup to do the same thing.
Google wrote "starting today, we support shippingDetails schema.org markup as an alternative way for retailers to be eligible for shipping details in Google Search results."
This schema is aimed at helping searchers see shipping costs and estimated delivery timeframes based on the searcher's location and your company's shipping policies. Shipping details can appear in the overview and stores tabs in Google Search for a specific product result. To be eligible for this enhancement, add OfferShippingDetails structured data. For more examples on how to model free shipping, multiple services, and regions you don't ship to, review the Shipping details best practices.
This schema is currently only available in the US, in English, and on mobile devices.
Here is what it looks like on the front end of search:
Google explained that this method of using schema will only make your shipping data eligible to be shown on certain Google Search results. To also show your shipping data in unpaid listings on the Google Shopping tab and other result types, you'll need to configure shipping settings in Merchant Center.
The technical docs list out these as required properties:
- shippingDestination
- shippingDestination.addressCountry
There are a dozen or so recommended properties as well listed in those docs.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
