New Schema.org support for retailer shipping data
webmasters.googleblog.com
webmasters.googleblog.com
This is a pretty good schema.
I was expecting something a little more naive, but there are concepts in here that I believe would let us expose everything important to Google about our shipping options. Enough to let them compute an accurate price, time, and label, at any given point in time.
Things like the cut-off time, and being able to represent which days/hours your warehouses are open is really important in this sort of thing.
This. You can pretty much think of schema.org as "The Semantic Web - The Good Parts". It's not a literal description of course (there's plenty of potentially worthwhile 'semantics' that isn't covered there) but it's in the ballpark. And the best part is that sites are incented to be truthful wrt. their machine readable info, because they might get banned/downranked by the major search engines otherwise. So everyone benefits.
For example, recipe sites are overwhelmed with pages and pages of generally poorly written and uninteresting background information designed to make you see as many ads as possible. However, many recipe sites added metadata with complete recipe contents, free of fluff. Sure, Google uses that to read off recipes from the Home, but there's also a python module that does the same and could be linked into a custom recipe book.
In these cases, everyone but the content producer is better off for not having to wade through junk content to find what you're looking for.
Making users visit your site to look up shipping status just to juice your traffic stats when you'd could provide it in a more convenient way is what everybody on this site would be calling a "dark pattern" if a big tech company did it. And just because you're small, doesn't make it any less annoying to your users.
If you want to say that eliminating steps and allowing people to get what they want without having to go through your site means that you lose the opportunity to push other sales on them or something, then okay, fine, make that argument. But be honest about it, and don't try to frame things as if your foremost concern is for what the people want, instead of what it really is—which is trying to optimize for conditions that are best for you, the party that the people are otherwise made to deal with.
Then Google offer a way for people to buy your products simply. Then they prioritise your competitors that use Google's offering because it's simpler for the user. Then you have to use Google to sell your products too. Then the price goes up or you get removed from the listings for some arbritary reason with no support.
> If you want to say that eliminating steps and allowing people to get what they want without having to go through your site means that you lose the opportunity to push other sales on them or something, then okay, fine, make that argument. But be honest about it, and don't try to frame things as if your foremost concern is for what the people want, instead of what it really is—which is trying to optimize for conditions that are best for you, the party that the people are otherwise made to deal with.
If we're going to be honest, we have to frame this as Google trying to grab an opportunity to push other sales on users, not as a them trying to get people what they want faster.
And while we're being honest, we also have to acknowledge that Google is already extraordinarily powerful (as shown by the assumption that "eliminating steps" means "eliminating non-Google interactions"), and giving them this kind of data only makes them more so.
Schema doesn't seem to have any benefit to anyone but Google.
There is a lot of valid criticism of large tech companies like G and FB. However, it is up to us as individuals to control our own use of technologies, limit ourselves in our interaction and data sharing. Off topic, but I am a happy customer of freedom.to that lets me place what are effectively parental controls on my own use of social media and other digital time wasters.
Digital media is dehumanizing unless used very sparingly. I use G and FB services but in a very controlled way for what I think is my own benefit, not theirs.
Your answer misses the point, which is that microdata and co profit Google first and foremost who are extracting information from 3rd parties and displaying that information on their own website or crunching them for various purposes without giving back web traffic or a cent.
Implementing micro data on public facing websites isn't cost free.
Sorry, but the claim was this:
> Schema doesn't seem to have any benefit to anyone but Google
If that's not "the point", then the comment shouldn't have suggested that it was.
> > Schema doesn't seem to have any benefit to anyone but Google
I think the key word is "seem" here. Hypothetically, microdata could help other companies - but I don't know of any that use it.
If I have an e-commerce website that sells personalised hats and I add the shipping info microdata to it, who is going to use that other than google?
If you expect to show up generally favorably in a shopping comparison, having shipping data available would seem to be useful, since people may not want to purchase without an idea of when they'd get the items.
Of course, if you don't get purchases through those channels now, adding shipping data probably won't help.
Uh... the human on the other end that Google is relaying the information to...
However, we're in a comment thread that went
> > Schema doesn't seem to have any benefit to anyone but Google.
> I fail to see how small businesses are prevented from using metadata.
The only use case I can think of for small businesses is scraping your rivals and seeing what they're getting up to.
No point enabling that behavior for site owners.
So now I can [verbed] surface a [Google] surface on my [Microsoft] Surface while sitting on my [kitchen counter] surface.