Premium answers the questions that start with "but". But can I return it? But do you ship to me? But do you have it in blue, size 42?
The base edition makes a product understandable: what it is, what it costs, whether it is in stock. That is enough for search engines and AI assistants not to skip you. Premium adds the detail - variants, delivery, returns, GTINs, specifications, your loyalty program, and every storefront at once. The more completely a product is described, the more of a shopper's questions the assistant has an answer to - and the more often that answer is your store.
An assistant answers with what it found. What it did not find, it does not mention
Shoppers no longer page through a catalog. They ask out loud or in a chat, and they get a finished answer. The assistant builds it from whatever it could read on your store page, and it stays silent about what is not there. Not because your store is bad: there is simply nowhere to take the answer from.
And it does not show a results page - it picks and recommends. If it understood your store less well than the one next door, it will not gamble: it names the one it understood better. So an empty field is not a small gap in settings, it is a shopper's question left unanswered.
They read the same markup, and each of them searches its own way:
ChatGPT
Gemini
Claude
Perplexity
Google
Bing and Copilot
Each has its own crawl and its own index - ChatGPT uses its own bot and says a site that blocks it will not appear in ChatGPT search results, Gemini is grounded in Google's live index, Perplexity builds an index of its own. So "one of them understood me" does not mean "all of them did". The vocabulary on the page, though, is shared: Product was announced jointly by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex, and the industry has no other standard for describing a product.
This is what your store looks like to a machine: not a pile of data, but a connected graph. The store is described once, and every product points back at that description. Built from a real product page - your store gets exactly the same shape.
None of this is our invention. Every field is documented by Google, so you can open it and check: product structured data, product variants, return policy, loyalty program. Bing's own markup validator reads the same JSON-LD.
Seven answers the base edition does not have
- Variants, each one in its own right. Color and size get their own URL, their own price, their own availability and their own SKU. Your shopper wants the blue one in size 42 - they land straight on it, not on a card where everything has to be picked again.
An agent has somewhere to send the shopper for one specific variant: with no distinct URL it picks the store that has one. In the results, Google shows color and size right in the listing. - Delivery - where, for how much, how fast. Your store states once which countries it ships to, at what cost and in what time, and every product points at it.
This is the most common question after price. An assistant can answer "it arrives by Friday" because it sees the transit time in business days and the cutoff - "we ship fast" yields nothing. Google shows shipping in the product listing and specifically asks you to declare free shipping. - Returns - how long, how, and who pays. The return window, the method, and whose money covers the shipping. That objection surfaces right at the cart, and it is better answered before then.
The second most common question. In ChatGPT's product data a return policy link is required for checkout - without it the product does not enter agentic purchasing at all. - GTINs and manufacturer part numbers. The code that identifies one and the same item in any catalog in the world. Without it your product is "some lamp"; with it, a specific item from a specific manufacturer.
The hardest requirement of them all: in ChatGPT's product data a GTIN or an MPN is required whenever the item is identifiable. Search engines need it just to include you in comparison. - Every specification, the manufacturer, categories and product video. Everything you already filled in inside Shop-Script goes to the machine with proper unit codes, instead of sitting in the card for human eyes only.
Only in that form can an assistant run "find one under five kilograms" or "more than two kilowatts". The category travels as a Google taxonomy ID, identical across languages, and it decides which shopping surface considers your product. - Your loyalty program - named, not implied. Shop-Script's built-in program stores the accrual rate, but not a public name or description, and Google requires both. You fill them in once inside the plugin, and the program appears in the markup: what it is called, what a member gets, and where to join.
A shopper who asks an assistant about the program gets an answer instead of silence. - Pricing in detail. Item condition, the old price beside the new one, price per meter or per kilogram. A discount looks like a discount, not just a number.
Here the payoff is money rather than visibility: price, currency, availability and condition on the page enable automatic item updates in Merchant Center - Google pulls the current values straight from the page when they drift from your feed. A price mismatch between site and feed is a disapproval reason.
And separately - every storefront at once. However many domains point at this store, the markup appears on each of them with its own settings and its own company card: the category path, the currency and the language come from the storefront the page was opened on. Otherwise one storefront is marked up and the other is lost entirely.
Base
- Product, price, availability, images, brand, rating and reviews.
- Organization, breadcrumbs, store search box.
- A built-in check of what is published.
- Your main store domain.
Premium detail
- Everything in Base, plus variants with their own URLs.
- Delivery, returns, GTINs, specifications, manufacturer, video.
- Google product category - with search and automatic matching.
- Loyalty program: its name, what it gives and where to join.
- Item condition, the old price, price per unit.
- A report of where every value came from, and conflict detection.
- All storefronts on all domains.
You do not have to take our word for any of it: hand your page to the Rich Results Test, then watch the Merchant listings and Product snippets reports in your own Search Console. Inside the plugin, the built-in check names the exact product it looked at and tells you what that product is missing.
Honestly, with no promises. Markup does not raise rankings by itself: neither Google nor Bing states that structured data is a ranking factor - though both state plainly that it helps a search engine understand the page - and Google does not guarantee that a rich result will be shown. It does something else: it turns your page into a source that search engines and AI models can take facts from conveniently and reliably. What they show, and whom they recommend, stays their decision - but your data will be there to take. Premium is worth it when your products have variants, when delivery and returns are a real objection for your shoppers, or when you run more than one storefront. If your catalog is simple and you have one domain, the base edition is enough, and we will say so plainly.
