# I checked the product markup of 14 well-known Shopify brands: all pass Google's minimum, only 2 tell machines what shipping costs

> Source: <https://dev.to/fast_data_asap/i-checked-the-product-markup-of-14-well-known-shopify-brands-all-pass-googles-minimum-only-2-4d1l>
> Published: 2026-11-04 07:48:16+00:00

When an AI shopping assistant or Google's merchant crawler looks at a product page, it rarely "sees" the page. It reads the structured data: the `Product` JSON-LD block with price, availability, identifiers, shipping and returns. Whatever is not in that block may as well not exist for a machine.

On 4 November 2026 I checked one product page each from 21 well-known Shopify brands. 14 came back with a readable page; the rest are covered at the end.

*Disclosure: I built the checker used here, the [Product Schema Checker](https://apify.com/fast_data_asap/product-schema-checker) on Apify. How to run it on your own pages is at the end.*

`/products.json` feed, so the sample is not cherry-picked.`Product` was scored against what Google's merchant listings and AI shopping agents use: name, image, price, currency, availability, brand, identifiers (GTIN/SKU/MPN), rating, reviews, item condition, shipping details and return policy.
All 14 pages had a `Product` in JSON-LD with:

That is Shopify's theme layer doing its job. Any store on a modern theme gets these for free.

The median score was **75 of 100**. The points were lost on the same fields again and again:

| Field | Pages that have it | 
|---|---|
| `shippingDetails` (shipping cost and time) | **2 of 14** | 
| `hasMerchantReturnPolicy` | **3 of 14** | 
| `aggregateRating` (star rating) | 4 of 14 | 
| `gtin` (barcode) | 4 of 14 | 
| `review` (individual reviews) | 0 of 14 | 
| `itemCondition` | 5 of 14 | 

Only **Outdoor Voices (94)** and **Taylor Stitch (92)** declared both shipping and returns in their markup. Everyone else leaves an assistant to guess the two questions shoppers ask most: "what does delivery cost?" and "can I send it back?"

Three observations from the details:

**1. Ratings may be on the page, but not in the data.** In the plain HTML, only 4 of 14 expose `aggregateRating`, and none has individual reviews. Most review widgets load with JavaScript after the page renders, so if a store shows stars that way, a crawler that does not run scripts never sees them. Most review apps can write a JSON-LD rating into the theme. It is usually one setting.

**2. GTINs are rare and not always real.** Only 4 pages had a `gtin` field. One of them contained `15U2UGGFXG60`, which is not a valid GTIN at all (GTINs are 8, 12, 13 or 14 digits with a check digit). It looks like an internal SKU in the wrong field. Google matches products across shops by GTIN, so a wrong value can hurt more than a missing one.

**3. "Out of stock" is often the theme's default.** 4 of the 14 pages declared `OutOfStock`, although the product was listed in the store's live feed. One possible cause on Shopify: the markup describes only one variant (for example a sold-out size). An agent then reads the whole product as unavailable.

So a third of the sample turned away a polite, single request from a data center. That is a defensible security choice. But it is worth knowing that some AI assistants fetch pages from similar infrastructure, and a shop that rate-limits them by default may be invisible to them.

`hasMerchantReturnPolicy` and `shippingDetails` to the product JSON-LD. Google also lets you set them once at the organization level. Both are static for most shops: write them once and you are done.`aggregateRating` is in the HTML and not only in the widget.`ProductGroup` or multiple `Offer` s), not just the first.

```
curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/fast_data_asap~product-schema-checker/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"startUrls": ["https://your-store.com/products/your-product"]}'
```

You get one flat row per URL: all schema types found, the product fields, `missingRequired`, `missingRecommended`, a score and grade, and concrete fix hints. It costs $0.002 per product page found; pages without product markup, blocked pages and errors are free. The 21 pages here took a few seconds.

For barcodes, the [EAN/GTIN Lookup](https://apify.com/fast_data_asap/ean-gtin-lookup) validates check digits and looks up open product data for $0.0002 per code.

*Data: one product page each from 21 Shopify stores, plain HTTP, 4 November 2026. A different product or a crawl from another network can give different results.*