Warning about missing return policy info in WooCommerce

Have you received a warning from Google’s Rich Results Test or Google Search Console about a missing field called hasMerchantReturnPolicy for one of your products? Don’t worry, nothing’s wrong with your site: Google has changed its handling of product schema for return policies! In this article, we’ll explain how you can handle this warning.

What has Google changed about the product schema for return policies?

You can now provide details about your return policy, including supported countries, timing constraints, return fees, return methods, and more in your site’s Schema.org structured data code. When you add this info to your structured data, you make your merchant listing eligible to show these return policy details in Google’s search results.

Certain fields are required for rich results, such as the product name. The return policy is optional: leaving out optional fields in schema won’t hurt your performance.

For all the detailed information, you can read Google’s Introduction to product structured data.

Why am I getting warnings?

As a result of Google’s change, any user who hasn’t defined their return policy in their schema (structured data code) will receive warnings from Google Search Console and Google’s Rich Results Test. If you rely on Yoast WooCommerce SEO for your product schema, you will also receive these warnings.

After careful consideration, we have decided not to support Google’s new returns policy schema at this time. WooCommerce lacks structured inputs for defining return policies, and creating and managing an entire interface solely for rich results would be resource-intensive for us.

What should I do when I get a missing field warning?

In the vast majority of cases, you won’t need to do, change, or fix anything. Your product schema is valid. The schema that is missing (MerchantReturnPolicy) is optional, and leaving out optional schema won’t hurt your performance.

If you want to add the missing field yourself, you can use Yoast’s Schema API to customize your structured data and add any variables that you require. Alternatively, if you would like Yoast to support the return policy schema in Yoast WooCommerce SEO, please reach out to our support team.

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