While the appeal of rich snippet markup is obvious, many Internet retailers have been slow to take advantage of the opportunity on their product pages.
Whether the reason for this is the complexity of doing so, or because their ecommerce platform just doesn't support such an initiative, those merchants that do deploy rich snippets stand to capture far more attention on the search results pages than their competition.
The benefit of adding markup (Microdata, RDFa, or JSON-LD) to product pages specifically is that it provides search engines an opportunity to showcase detailed product information in the rich search results including image search.
Users are able to see price, availability, and review ratings on the search results and that's a powerful way to attract potential buyers as they search for items to purchase.
Product markup can be used on two types of pages - product pages (those that showcase a specific product) and shopping aggregator pages (those that list the same product but from different sellers). While the markup varies slightly for each of these page types, the guidelines should be followed closely.
For example, it's not possible to use markup for a category or a list of products as it is limited to specific products. Also, adult-related products are not supported and reviews will need to use a valid name for a person or team.
Keep in mind when marking up content for product information the following properties of the schema.org product type are supported - name, image (the URL to the image file), description, brand, review, aggregate rating, offers and SKU. Only name and image are actually required with the remaining properties being recommended.
There's certainly no guarantee that marking up product pages (or product aggregator pages) will yield a rich snippet, but it dramatically increases the chances. If generating a higher click-through rate is the objective, marking up these pages with rich snippets is a great way to do that.
