Google Schema.org alternate to PriceSpecification

Question

I'm back with another Schema.org / Google inconsistency.

Our store sells many products that have different variants each with their own price. For example a heater may be sold in any of 8 BTU levels with a higher BTU heater costing more. We present all variants on the same product page and display a price range until the user selects their specific variant.

The question is how can I tell Google that the product has a price range? Or if I can enumerate the variants as individual sub-products with their own prices that may suffice.

What we've tried:

We started by using Offer's priceSpecification property. We tried this with both an itemtype of PriceSpecification and of UnitPriceSpecification. These left us with the Error: Incomplete microdata with schema.org. in Google's Structured Data Testing Tool and even more importantly with error Missing: price in our Webmaster Tool's Structured Data tab (which nuked our rich snippet). This is supposedly because Google erroneously expects the Offer→price property to always be set even if priceSpecification is in use (see: This SO post on priceSpecification ). Example:

<div itemtype="http://schema.org/Offer" itemscope itemprop="offers">
    <div itemtype="http://schema.org/UnitPriceSpecification" itemscope itemprop="priceSpecification" class="price-box">
        <span id="product-price-6048" class="price">$571.20 - $894.75</span>
        <meta content="571.2" itemprop="minPrice">
        <meta content="894.75" itemprop="maxPrice">
        <meta content="USD" itemprop="priceCurrency">
    </div>
</div>

We also tried just passing the human-readable string "$571.20 - $897.75" as the Offer→price property. That obviously didn't work as Google didn't know how to parse it.

According to point 8 of this SEOMoz article you can use AggregateOffer as a workaround to list a price range for a product/product-set. However Schema.org clearly states AggregateOffer is for

When a single product is associated with multiple offers (for example, the same pair of shoes is offered by different merchants)

While it will likely work for now, using AggregateOffer in our case seems like a kludge that's liable to break.

So again, how can I inform Google that a product price is in a range depending on user selections? Has anyone had any success using the PriceSpecification for a product, especially to list a product price range? Or is there another way to accomplish the same result?

Answer 1

I had the same problem in a different context. My solution was to set the price of the offer to the lowest price and then specify an instance of PriceSpecification where I state the minimum price that is of EQUAL value to the value in the price tag and then a maximum price. This effectively means that there is a product with price X AND that X price corresponds to the minimum price.

It's not perfect, but at least all the data is there. I've done this in JSON-LD as it is the recommendation from Google, see the example above to specify more that one offer to the same product and then for each offer specify a price and a minimum price. You could also specify the maximum price. That way it is clear that the offer is a range:

{
  "@context": "http://schema.org",
  "@type": "Product",
  "description": "This Fancy Product is all you will ever need.",
  "name": "My Fancy Product",
  "model" :"https://www.freebase.com/m/02116f",
  "offers": [
        {
    "@type": "Offer",
    "category": "base",
    "availability": "http://schema.org/InStock",
      "priceSpecification":{
        "minPrice": "10.00",
        "priceCurrency": "EUR"
      },
      "price": "10.00"
    },
    {
    "@type": "Offer",
    "category": "high-end",
    "availability": "http://schema.org/InStock",
    "priceSpecification":{
        "minPrice": "50.00",
        "priceCurrency": "EUR"
      },
      "price": "50.00"
  }
    ]
    }

Answer 2

After a month of testing different permutations of the SEOMoz AggregateOffer solution I've come to the conclusion it doesn't work. Until Google supports the PriceSpecification property of the offer and stops requiring a single fixed price for offer there isn't a way to list a group of products/variants under one price-range umbrella.

If anyone finds a better solution post it here.