Configuring minimum quantity products in Google Merchant Center with JSON-LD for SEO

Google Merchant Center is very particular with your product prices. The data that you send in your data feed needs to match the structured data on your site exactly.

Normally this is easy, as each product and variant has a price.

But sometimes you’re selling multiple products as a group and need to set a minimum quantity. Like a set of 100 pens.

Due to how the data works in all of the various systems, this can be tricky to get right.

When this is wrong, Merchant Center will show you a warning: "Insufficient match of microdata price information"

Here’s what you need to do.

I’m going to use a set of pens as an example. That’s the products the customer brought this need to my attention. It should work with any other minimum quantity product.

1. Set the per-unit price in Shopify

First you want to make sure you have a per-unit price in Shopify.

If it’s $0.39 per pen, you’d set your price in Shopify to $0.39.

2. Set the product metafield for the minimum quantity for JSON-LD for SEO

Normally JSON-LD for SEO will just use the product price in the JSON-LD structured data.

In this case it would be $0.39.

But by setting the minimum quantity metafield to 100, JSON-LD for SEO will know to add the additional Schema needed for that.

Create a metafield on the product:

• namespace: jsonld
• key: minimum_quantity
• value: 100

My recommended Shopify Metafield Tools.

2. Optional: Store-wide minimum quantity

As an alternative to setting the minimum quantity for each product, JSON-LD for SEO will let you set a default minimum quantity that applies to all products.

Create a metafield on the store:

• namespace: jsonld
• key: minimum_quantity
• value: 100

Note that this is a store metafield instead of a product metafield.

If you set both the store and product minimum_quantity, the product one will win. This means you can set a default of 100 for your store and then on a few select products set a different value like 24.

3. Make sure your data feed is sending the prices in correctly

Whatever you use for your Google Merchant Center data feed, make sure the following fields are set for this product/variant.

1. unit_pricing_base_measure to 0.39 (value) and ct (unit). This says the base price per unit (count) is 0.39.
2. unit_pricing_measure to 1 (value) and ct (unit). This says the price is per 1/unit.
3. Set the price to 39.00, which is the base price per unit multiplied by the minimum quantity.

You'll want to contact your product feed provider to help set this up. You can also reference Google Merchant Center documentation for Minimum Order Value, Unit pricing base measure, and Unit pricing measure.

4. Wait for Google to update

With those in place, Google will understand the pricing and will show the minimum quantity price and per unit price in Merchant Center.

It might take awhile before this happens, maybe even a couple of weeks.