Google merchants not understanding variants

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  • Hikashop Business
3 months 1 week ago #358503

Hi,

How can i solve the issue with google merchants not caring about Variants options/coding?

- If i have for instance 4 product variants (colors) and 1 is on a discount (set at a lower price in restrictions for that variant), google will show in shopping ads that the whole line, or the default variant is on that lowered price.
- If some of the variants are out of stock (preorder plugin enabled) Google merchants will still show the item as in stock because at least 1 of the variants is still in stock. (stock for these seperately set in the variant options)
- Google will disable/disapprove the product if i set it at the actual status 'preorder' because at least 1 variant is still in stock.

Hope you can solve this :).

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3 months 6 days ago #358506

Hi,

- If i have for instance 4 product variants (colors) and 1 is on a discount (set at a lower price in restrictions for that variant), google will show in shopping ads that the whole line, or the default variant is on that lowered price.

First, there is now a setting to include variants in the plugin. If that setting is activated, the plugin will output 1 row per variant instead of 1 row for the whole product.
Also, in the settings of the plugin, you have a setting to choose how it will select the price. By default, it's set to "cheapest", but you could also change it to "most expensive".

- If some of the variants are out of stock (preorder plugin enabled) Google merchants will still show the item as in stock because at least 1 of the variants is still in stock. (stock for these seperately set in the variant options)

Yes, that's normal. But if you activate the "include variants" setting, then each entry in the XML will get the stock from the corresponding variant so you won't have the problem.

- Google will disable/disapprove the product if i set it at the actual status 'preorder' because at least 1 variant is still in stock.

I'm not sure what you mean by " if i set it at the actual status 'preorder'" since products don't have status in HikaShop. Could you provide more context ?

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  • Hikashop Business
3 months 5 days ago #358560

Hi,

I think you misunderstood the issue by thinking it's about the plugin/plugin settings.

All of these issues are done by google automatically.

I have a merchants account, in the product area i have added my products manually.
For variants i have added the variants manually.
Google will see/decide by crawling the product page that the variants are irrelevant. (of course they are not but that is the issue, google can not or will not see the difference in stock+pricing between variants on 1 product page.
- So if i have 2 products in Merchants for google shopping
1. Lamp -color white 99,- -out of stock
2. Lamp -color pink 89,- -in stock
And White is the default color in product variants inside hikashop, google will prefer/force White for the ads and yet say they are in stock and 89,- price.

So it seems Google is completely ignoring any code that distinguishes the variants.
I see some competition running woocommerce of shopify that have all variants on 1 product page and yet google shopping lists all the variants seperately correctly.

Hope this is more clear :)

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3 months 5 days ago #358565

Hi

Ok, so your question is actually not about the Google Products plugin, but about how Google search parses the product pages to find the details of the products.

I think the solution here would be to develop something which would add JSON-LD markup to the product pages:
developers.google.com/search/docs/appear...ant-listings_product
www.schemaapp.com/schema-markup/schema-o...roductmodels-offers/
As per the second link, it seems to support multiple variants and so Google would be to understand that the page has several variants and know the stock, price, etc for each one.

I would recommend checking if your competition has JSON-LD markup on their pages. I didn't find an alternative, so I suppose that it is what they are doing.

Until we develop this (it's not something that can be done with a few lines of code, but require complex coding), a good way of testing whether that would be a solution would be to create a custom product textarea field where you would manually enter the JSON-LD markup for all the variants of a product and then display it on the product page with a small override of product / show where you could manually display the content of the custom field inside a script tag with the application/ld+json type attribute.

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  • Hikashop Business
3 months 5 days ago #358583

Hi, thanks for checking.

As i am both very unskillful in code and already glad i can run the website, this would not be an option for me.
If you are willing to try it on my site and have me report back on how google ads runs after, you are welcome.
Otherwise i hope it will be scheduled in on future updates and i will wait for it :).

Have a nice weekend!

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3 months 4 days ago #358586

Hi,

Well, that's not something I can develop in a few hours.
It requires proper development.
I've added this on our end as a high priority.

Thanks for your input !

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