Abstract
In this paper, we analyze the potential impact of e-commerce software packages on the diffusion of markup for structured data on the Web. We argue that such an analysis must focus on the product detail pages, i.e. the “deep links” to individual items, rather than the pure number of shop sites, for assessing the potential. Based on (1) a systematic analysis of the popularity of 56 software packages for e-commerce sites among the Alexa list of the one million most popular Web sites, we (2) estimate the number of product detail pages for the respective shops and then (3) project the potential lever of each e-commerce package for the adoption of structured markup, assumed that adding support for structured data can be made a readily available feature of a respective software. Our results indicate that by adding a structured markup component to as little as seven popular e-commerce systems, we could instantly deploy structured data markup on nearly 90 % of the product detail pages among the one million most popular Web sites. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.