Search engines like Google read your eCommerce store’s product information differently than people do. “Structured Data” was developed to help search engines properly understand the context of your product content. Structured data uses a standardized format to organize product info in such a way that it can be accurately categorized by search engines. The result is that when people use Google, Bing, and other search engines to find a product, the search engine can display special results that include your product names, brands, customer reviews, pricing and availability, and other product-specific information.

Given how often people now use the internet to search for a particular product, it’s critical that whatever you’re selling is accurately portrayed in search results. To this end, many eCommerce platforms and services like Bigcommerce and Yotpo automatically output structured data for your products. Generally speaking, that’s a good thing.

The Problem

There is an issue you may run into if you have a Bigcommerce store and also use Yotpo. While Bigcommerce will output structured data for your various product details, it does so as microdata embedded in HTML tags in the theme files. On the other hand, Yotpo automatically embeds structured data from it’s service in the form of a JSON-LD object. On top of having some duplicate structured data in two different formats, each of the two types provides an incomplete snapshot of your product’s data.

The result is that Google and other search engines may be presented with only part of the structured data, and on top of that it’s in two different code formats. This is bad for business, as it can create multiple unlinked structured data objects in the Google Structured Data Testing Tool, or cause the structured data to be ignored altogether by search engines.

The Solution

We can combine the Bigcommerce product data and Yotpo customer reviews data into a single, elegant, block of structured data. To accomplish this, we utilize calls to the Yotpo API and Handlebars within Bigcommerce to retrieve Bigcommerce product data. We then strip out all the duplicate snippets from both Bigcommerce and Yotpo to keep everything clean and tidy. The result allows Google to display all the structured data for a given product as one object.

How this Helps

Besides eliminating warnings and errors in your structured data, this cleans up the product’s HTML code in Bigcommerce by including only one single snippet on your product page. This solution can be applied to most Bigcommerce themes.

If you would like to get this set up on your Bigcommerce site, just fill out the form below and we’ll be happy to help!

For Help with Bigcommerce + Yotpo Structured Data: