Definition
A discount, price, availability, bundle, or shipping offer is hard for a crawler, shopping channel, or AI system to interpret from public evidence. Offer interpretability is therefore the degree to which a machine can unambiguously resolve a purchasable offer's identity, eligibility, current price, availability, shipping, returns, and required warnings from merchant-exposed data - structured markup, feeds, protocol responses, and rendered DOM.
StoreSteady treats offer interpretability as a reference term because Missing machine-readable eligibility: The agent cannot determine who can buy at what price.
Why it matters
- Missing machine-readable eligibility changes what a crawler, shopping channel, or AI assistant can safely infer about the merchant surface.
- Without a named category, operators tend to treat offer interpretability as generic AI noise instead of a reproducible finding with evidence and a validation path.
Evidence sources
- `Product`/`Offer` structured data fidelity, feed-vs-markup parity, UCP-level eligibility attributes, accessibility-tree exposure of pricing and policy, region segmentation, mandatory legal warning exposure.
How StoreSteady detects it
Combine structured-data linting (schema.org validators), DOM and accessibility-tree parsing, regional URL crawls, feed-vs-markup diff at field level, and protocol-level eligibility validation via UCP probes.
False positive risks
- A PDP with a price range (`$49.99 - $79.99`) and no resolvable per-variant `Offer`.
- An offer whose loyalty-tier price discount is shown to the visible user but not exposed in any machine-readable form.
How to fix it
- Identify the merchant-controlled source that creates the offer interpretability signal.
- Reconcile visible copy, machine-readable data, policy text, feed state, and checkout behavior where the term applies.
- Keep the fix high-level in public docs; detailed remediation belongs inside paid scan workflows.
How to validate it
Rerun the same evidence capture used for detection. The finding is validated only when the original offer interpretability signal no longer reproduces and adjacent source surfaces still agree.
Example finding
Missing machine-readable eligibility
Observed: A PDP exposes a single `Offer` block with `price`, `priceCurrency`, `availability`, `priceValidUntil`, `eligibleRegion`, `shippingDetails`, `hasMerchantReturnPolicy`, and `acceptedPaymentMethod`. The Merchant Center feed and the UCP product feed agree with the structured data on every field.
Likely impact: Missing machine-readable eligibility: The agent cannot determine who can buy at what price.
Probable fix location: Public commerce source of truth
Related StoreSteady issue codes
| Code | Title | Scanner mapping |
|---|---|---|
| OFF-001 | Missing machine-readable eligibility | missing_condition_microdata |
| OFF-002 | Ambiguous offer state | merchant_price_invalid |
| OFF-003 | Hidden condition not exposed to agents | Planned detector |
| OFF-004 | Regional rendering mismatch | no_country_segmentation |
| OFF-005 | Feed/markup parity gap | shopify_products_missing_from_merchant |
Related standards
See also
Sources
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