If you’ve read our guide to Shopify structured data or our Shopify product schema guide, you already know the basics: Shopify’s native Product schema is thin, and reviews, FAQPage, and Organization markup all have to be added separately. This post is about a narrower gap inside that same Product schema — one neither of those guides covers, because it isn’t about star ratings or the general schema list. It’s about two specific properties: shippingDetails and hasMerchantReturnPolicy.

Those are the fields Google’s Merchant Listing rich results and AI shopping answers actually check before they’ll display your shipping cost or return window next to a search result. If you’ve seen a “Missing field” warning in Search Console’s Merchant listings report, or you’re chasing Google Merchant Center visibility, these two properties are almost always why.

What Google’s Merchant Listing rich results actually check

Merchant Listing structured data requires the basics first: name, image, and an offers object with price, priceCurrency, and availability. Most Shopify themes generate that much on their own.

shippingDetails and hasMerchantReturnPolicy sit one level further in. Google’s own documentation technically lists both as recommended rather than required. But “recommended” undersells what they do: they’re the properties that unlock the actual shipping cost and return window shown in the rich result, and their absence is exactly what triggers the “Missing field ‘shippingDetails’ (in ‘offers’)” and “Missing field ‘hasMerchantReturnPolicy’ (in ‘offers’)” warnings merchants see in Search Console’s Merchant listings report.

Why Shopify’s native schema doesn’t include them

Shopify 2.0 themes (Dawn and its derivatives) generate Product JSON-LD automatically — name, image, description, and an offers block with price, currency, availability, and URL, plus brand and SKU on most themes. That schema never includes shippingDetails or hasMerchantReturnPolicy, because Shopify has no reliable way to auto-generate them: your shipping rates and return window live in your store settings and Shopify Shipping/Merchant Center configuration, not in the theme’s product template.

This isn’t a hypothetical gap. One Shopify merchant asked exactly this question in the Shopify Community forum: how do I add hasMerchantReturnPolicy and shippingDetails to my structured data? It’s a common enough question that it comes up repeatedly across Shopify’s own support forums, usually prompted by a fresh batch of Search Console warnings.

That stat is about human shoppers, not search engines — but it explains why Google bothers checking these fields at all. The same information that reassures a person deciding whether to buy is exactly what a rich result (or an AI shopping answer) needs in machine-readable form to display it up front.

How to add hasMerchantReturnPolicy and shippingDetails without hand-coding Liquid

There are two situations, and they call for different fixes.

1. One policy, storewide. If your shipping rates and return window are the same across your whole catalogue, Google explicitly recommends setting this once at the account level — in Google Merchant Center or Search Console’s dedicated shipping and returns settings — rather than repeating it in per-product JSON-LD. No schema, no code. Google applies it across every listing tied to that account.
2. Per-product exceptions. Final-sale items, oversized-item shipping surcharges, or a different return window on a specific collection need the override written into that product’s offers object — the shippingDetails and hasMerchantReturnPolicy properties nested inside it. That requires either editing your theme’s product JSON-LD snippet directly (you can ask ChatGPT to draft the JSON-LD block for a specific policy and paste it in yourself), or using an SEO app that builds it from your actual settings and keeps it in sync as those settings change.

Whichever route you take, re-test the page afterward — adding schema that doesn’t validate is worse than not adding it at all.

How to check whether you’re affected

Two free tools show you exactly where you stand:

• Google’s Rich Results Test — enter a product URL and it lists every schema property it detects, including whether shippingDetails or hasMerchantReturnPolicy are present and valid.
• Search Console’s Merchant listings and Product snippets reports — these are the reports where the “Missing field” warnings show up. They’re flagged as non-critical issues, not errors: your product schema is still valid without them, but Google can’t show the richer shipping/return details until they’re filled in.

One rule that matters more here than usual

Your return and shipping schema has to match your actual policy. Google’s guidelines treat this the same way they treat fabricated review ratings: structured data that overstates or misstates a real policy — a shorter return window than schema claims, a shipping cost that doesn’t match checkout — is a data-quality problem that can get a listing suppressed, not just a missed opportunity. Whatever method you use to add these fields, keep them pointed at your real, current settings.