Structured Data and Product Variant Descriptions

Shopify Discussion

Topic summary

A Shopify store owner is receiving non-critical errors in Google Search Console for missing “description” fields in product variant structured data, despite having descriptions for all products. The issue appears to be that the theme isn’t properly passing this data to Google.

Proposed Solutions:

  • Manually add or verify the description field in the product schema code:
    "description": "{{ product.description | strip_html | escape }}"
  • One contributor recommends using json filter instead of escape for better formatting
  • Manual code editing is preferred over apps to avoid slowing down the store

Additional Context:

  • The user also sees errors for shippingDetails and hasMerchantReturnPolicy, but these can be safely ignored if shipping and return policies are already configured in Google Merchant Center
  • A video tutorial was shared for implementing a complete Google Shopping-focused structured data solution

Status: The discussion remains open with the original poster not yet confirming whether they’ve implemented the suggested code changes.

Summarized with AI on November 1. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

Hi all,

I am getting non-critical errors, Missing Field “description” (optional) in the Google Search Console under Merchant Listings for my shopify products with variants.

Although I have a common description for all variants for the same product, it looks like my Shopify theme is not picking up the data to share with Google.

Any ideas?

I am also getting non-critical errors for shippingDetails and hasMerchantReturnPolicy but I am not too fussed about these as it should get the info from Google Merchant Center.

2

@VD10 Hey, thanks for posting here.
make sure you product schema have this line in code:

"@type": "Product",
"description": "{{ product.description | strip_html | escape }}",
3

Thanks for your reply.

I am not sure I want to make changes to code.

Should we be using the product description (for the description of the structured data) or the meta tag description?

Would you recommend an app that does a really good job in schemas, ld+json?

4

@VD10 best way to add it manually

app will be slow your store.

5

Regarding shippingDetails and hasMerchantReturnPolicy, this can be ignored if you have a Google Merchant center account and you have added your shipping and returns in the account, then there is no need to add it again in the structured data.

For the description I recommend editing the code to the following:

"description": {{ product.description | strip_html | json }}

Or you can install a full version that is focus on Google shopping using the video below: