Deep Links to product variants for Google Shopping

[fthobe]

Hey @jarednorman & @kennyadsl ,

I think this one is a problem on it's own:

• I saw you have a google feed extension;
• there's the SEO extension

Both are kind of half baked or outdated and do in many cases not get the job done as they should. The most critical part where I see problems (also considering the state of solidus) is the fact that there are no deep links to variants served which hampers the capacity to do even only basic implementations of google shopping via structured data.

To quote Google Shopping Best Practices:

Pre-select the correct product variant in your landing page URL.
If a product has variants (like colour, size, pattern, material or other customisations), make sure that the variant that matches the product data is the one that appears on your landing page by default.

Where I see significant problems is that variants can not be directly linked, which creates problems with the whole way google shopping works with variants. The item pulled is just not the correct one ending up in structured data errors ending up having feeds be penalised and blocked. Speaking with @kennyadsl it became clear that you have done that in the past using the variantid.

What I would suggest is refactoring the solution to work with the current release and using the SKU for several reasons:

• I would consider structured data by today as a baseline for a shop to have to offer basic seo and google shopping
• I would consider the feed advanced covering edge cases with frequent pricing and availability events that outmatch the rhythm of the google crawler given also that the feed is much more instant.

What do you think?

Fabian