Sale price or 2 prices in Google Shopping and Merchant Center

Discounted price in Google Shopping. How to display a crossed out price in Google Shopping search results and what is behind it. So, let's go.

All online stores offer discounts. Isn't that right? It would be nice to display 2 prices in search results - the old crossed out one, and the new one. It looks something like this:

The crossed out price, or the old price according to the Merchant Center specification - Price.

The green price, or you can also say the current price according to the Merchant Center specification - Sale Price.

How to display a discounted price in Google Shopping?

👉 In the Merchant Center feed, you must add the “sale_price” parameter, which should look like this:

There are certain rules and features for using the “sale_price” parameter:

👉 Discounted prices should be not only in the feed, but also on the website. And they should be completely consistent with each other.

👉 The discount amount should be no less than 5% and no more than 90%. This rule is not specified for all countries in the documentation, but we see that it works almost always.

👉 The base price should not change for 30 days. This rule is also not written for all countries in the documentation, but we see that it works almost always. Although, there are cases when this rule is not followed, and for example, your discounted price may be shown for 15 days.

👉 The discounted price must be lower than the base old price.

👉 The currency of the base price and the discounted price must match.

Recommendations for using discounted prices:

➊ Be sure to update the product card microdata. Otherwise, if the robot incorrectly determines the prices on the product card page, it will block it, which, if there is a mass case, can lead to blocking the Merchant Center.

The Merchant Center robot scans product card pages and checks that the prices in the feed and on the site match.

There are several ways to update microdata:

1.1 In the microdata of the “Product” product card in the “Offer” type, add the “sale_price” parameter. This parameter is not described in schema.org and is not always recognized by the system, but it has worked for us for a long time and continues to work in projects.

It looks like this:

In addition, there will be a nice bonus for SEO, in search results, the product card will look like this (with two prices):

1.2 In the microdata of the “Product” product card, in the “Offer” data type, mark only one current price in the “Price” field.

In SEO results, the product card will then be displayed with only one price, which will look like this:

➋ Ideally, add the parameter “Discount validity period”. This parameter is not mandatory, but we see that it is better to use it to resolve controversial issues, so that the robots have more accurate information that there is really a sale, and not just price manipulation.

In Merchant Center, this parameter has the following name - “sale_price_effective_date”, which is displayed in the feed as follows:

Note that there must be a start and end date of the sale in the specified format.

If you use this parameter in the feed, then in the micro-markup of the product card you can also specify the date until which the price is valid using the “priceValidUntil” parameter, which will look like this:

☝ Due to search engine control over price manipulation, this issue is changing dynamically, so additional parameters or ways to solve the problem may appear.

We hope the material was useful to you, we will meet again.

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