Google Adds Organization-Level Return Policy

On June 11, 2024, Google introduced significant enhancements by rolling out new support for organization-level return policies.

This new support allows organizations to create product return policies that meet their specific operational needs for their own businesses. 

Additionally, in the previous year, Google launched a structured data return policy extraction on business products, including sales listings.

What Is the Purpose of Organization-Level Return Policies?

The addition of support for organization-level return policies makes it easier for businesses to establish general return policies without having to decide them individually for each product they sell.

Google adds that with organization-level return policies, companies can manage return policy markup integrally and reduce the size of Product structured data markup.

Here's a mockup of the organization-level return policy introduced by Google in Search.

For your information, adding Product markup to your pages can enable various information to appear in the product listing panel on Search, such as images, product snippets, popular product results, availability, price, shipping information, return information, and Shopping info.

As a result, the return policies established by these businesses can appear in the information panel, brand profiles, and product search results.

Furthermore, you need to include the return policy in structured data if you don't have a Merchant Center account but wish to add the policy to your business.

However, if you already have a Merchant Center account, you can directly add the return policy.

Assessing Return Policies Using Rich Results Testing

To test the organization-level return policies you have set, you can submit code snippets or page URLs to the Rich Results Testing tool. This tool will then verify the validity of the markup.

Google also advises local or online business operators to use one of the Organization subtypes, specifically LocalBusiness or OnlineStore.

With this new support, business operators can now add their business-related information to search listings without requiring additional time and effort.