A shopper asks an AI assistant about a product you sell, then asks what delivery costs and whether the item can go back. The assistant can only answer from what it can read on your store.
We checked 100 Shopify stores in October 2026 to see what an agent finds. 99 of them were measurable. On shipping and returns, most stores give an agent very little to work with.
What we found
- 88% of stores had no shipping or return terms in their product structured data. Only 12% had any
OfferShippingDetailsorMerchantReturnPolicyon a sampled product page. - 45% did not clearly state both shipping and returns on the product page itself.
- 25% disallow
/policies/in robots.txt. A crawler that obeys robots.txt will not read the policy pages on those stores. - Where we could read the shipping policy, 36% were empty or under 60 words. That figure covers 70 stores.
- On 3 stores, the policy pages returned an error on the storefront.
Access was not the problem. None of the 99 stores blocked an AI search or shopping agent in robots.txt. The agent is let in. It then finds a product page that does not say what delivery costs or how long the customer has to send the item back.
Why this matters now
A person will click through to a policy page. An agent that is comparing several stores may read only the product page and its structured data, and answer from that. If the return window is only on a page the agent cannot fetch, the honest answer it can give is "the store does not say".
We did not measure how often that costs a sale, so we make no claim about it. What we can say is that the fix is small, and it also helps human shoppers who never open the policy page.
Check your own store in five minutes
1. Read the product page as a stranger (1 minute).
Open your best-selling product. Without scrolling to the footer or opening another page, find the delivery cost or free-delivery threshold and the return window. If either is missing, that is your first fix.
2. Check robots.txt (1 minute).
Open yourstore.com/robots.txt and search for /policies/. If it sits under a Disallow line, crawlers that follow the rules skip your policy pages. That makes the product page text more important, not less.
3. Test the structured data (2 minutes).
Paste the product URL into Google's Rich Results Test. Open the Product result, then the Offer. Look for two properties: shippingDetails and hasMerchantReturnPolicy. In our sample, 88% of stores had neither.
4. Read your policies (1 minute).
In the Shopify admin, go to Settings, then Policies. Check that the shipping and refund policies are filled in and specific: costs, timeframes, and who pays for return postage.
Fix it, quickest first
Take every value from your own published policy. Do not copy example numbers from this article or anywhere else.
Fix 1: one plain line on the product page
Add a single line to the product template, in a text block or a collapsible row:
Free UK delivery over £50. 30-day returns.
That example shows the shape only. Yours must match your policy. Link the line to the full policy page.
This is the quickest fix, and every agent and every shopper can read it. If your robots.txt disallows /policies/, it is also the only place an agent that follows the rules can find the answer.
Fix 2: make the policy pages specific
A shipping policy under 60 words is unlikely to answer the questions a shopper asks. State:
- what delivery costs, and the free-delivery threshold if you have one
- how long you take to dispatch and how long delivery takes, by region
- the return window in days
- who pays for return postage
- how and when the refund is paid
Then check that the same numbers appear everywhere. A 30-day window in the policy and a 60-day window in the FAQ is worse than a short policy, because a customer can quote either.
Fix 3: add the terms to your product structured data
Structured data is the machine-readable summary of the product page. Two properties on the Offer carry these terms:
hasMerchantReturnPolicy: the country, the return window in days, the return method and who pays the return fee.shippingDetails: the shipping rate and currency, the destination country, and handling and transit times in days.
Before changing anything, find out where your Product structured data comes from: your theme, an SEO app, or both. Two sources that disagree are worse than one that is incomplete.
If the theme produces it, this is a theme code edit. Duplicate the theme first, or ask your developer. Google's "Merchant listing structured data" documentation lists the exact properties and accepted values. Some structured-data apps add these fields without a code change. We have not tested those apps, so we don't recommend one.
If you sell through the Google & YouTube channel, also set shipping and returns in Merchant Center. Google's documentation recommends a business-wide policy there. That covers Google. It does not cover agents that read your page directly, which is why fixes 1 and 2 come first.
Then test again
Run the product URL through the Rich Results Test once more. Confirm that both properties appear under the Offer with no errors, and that the values match your policy pages.
What our numbers can and cannot tell you
- The sample is 100 stores chosen by hand: large brands, mid-size brands and small independent stores in the US, UK, EU, Australia and New Zealand. It is not a random sample of all Shopify stores.
- It is a one-day snapshot, run from a UK IP address on 3 October 2026.
- We checked structured data on product pages. A store that declares its return policy only at organisation level on another page still counts in the 88%.
- "States shipping and returns on the product page" was measured by keyword rules. It shows whether the terms are likely present, not whether they are clear.
- We read the server-rendered HTML. Text added by JavaScript after the page loads counts as not visible. Agents that render the page in a browser may see more.
The full tables and method are in the study report.
A free check for your store
Our free agent-ready quick check runs six checks on a store URL. One of them reports whether shipping and return terms are in your product structured data, next to the figures above. It is an Agent Skill: a set of instruction files that an AI assistant such as Claude, Codex or Gemini CLI loads. We make it. It tells you what is missing and does not change anything in your store.
Get the free skills sampler (21 skills)
The paid Store Ops Pack for Shopify store owners ($29, 6 skills) includes a fuller audit that ranks the fixes for your store. Each skill is also sold on its own for $5.
Figures are from our October 2026 study of 100 Shopify stores, 99 of them measurable. The sample was chosen by hand and is not random. More guides are on the guides page.