If you've been using Shopify for a while, you might have heard of Metafield . They are regularly mentioned in Shopify e-commerce blog posts, in Shopify communication, and in what's new from Shopify.
But in the end, they remain little or not understood by most merchants and very often underused.
However, metafields are a fundamental element of the power and modularity of Shopify , in the same way as its APIs and are therefore essential to understand if you want to take full advantage of all the features of your Shopify e-commerce site.
Let's go together to discover metafields to finally understand everything and use them to the best.
Summary of metafields
- What is a metafield?
- What does a metafield look like?
- What is a metafield for?
- V1 metafields
- V2 metafields
- What are the types of V2 metafields?
- Why use metafields?
- How to use metafields without Shopify?
- Which applications to best use metafields?
- Metafield FAQs
- How do I bulk import metafields?
- How to bulk edit metafields?
- Review of metafields
What is a metafield?
So already, before starting, we will go back to the basic concept and explain what a metafield is precisely.
To put it simply, a metafield is information that you will add to your Shopify site in a special field: the metafield field.
Indeed, Shopify is a Saas solution , Software as a service. and therefore, the core, technical core of Shopify is not accessible to developers or Shopify Partner agencies.
Only Shopify has the ability to update Shopify's "internal" technical code and therefore control of the database.
Except, it is in the database that the information concerning your site is stored. How to add information when you don't have access to the code? Via the metafields!
Metafields can be compared to sorts of database field that we will apply to one or more elements of the site to add information.
This makes it possible to add a lot of flexibility in the use of the site without the need to code additional functions. Good to know: metafields are completely "free", their use and included in the price of Shopify , it doesn't matter if you use zero, one or thousands, it will not change your Shopify invoice.
We will see some examples of using metafields below.
What does a metafield look like?
Ok, so we can add information about many items in Shopify. But which ones actually?
Here is the list of elements in Shopify that can be “enhanced” with metafields:
- The site itself with the “shop” metafields
- Products and combinations produced with the “products” and “variants” metafields
- Pages with “pages” metafields
- Orders with the “order” metafield
- Blogs and articles with “blog” and “posts” metafields
- Customers with the “customer” metafield
- Collections with the “collection” metafield
The metafields, on the usage side, look like this:
Here is an example of metafiled to add a description at the bottom of Pikka's e-commerce blog .
The operation is very simple, a metafield is indeed composed of a type, a “Namespace” , a “Key” and a “value” . here we mainly see the perimeter of the metafield, its namespace and its key.
Shopify will load in the Liquid file to “translate” this metafield name by the value inside the metafield to make it dynamic.
That's already a lot of possibilities to customize your site even more! Indeed, you will be able for example, on each article of your blogs, to create a metafield “cooking time” which will appear only on articles of the type recipes. Let's see together what are the types of customization that can be done with metafields and what they can be used for an e-commerce manager on a day-to-day basis.
What is a metafield for?
Now that we have seen what a metafield on the technical side looks like, what can it be used for in practice?
The most obvious is of course to add information about the products.
For example, if you sell tableware products, you may want to indicate to customers whether your product is dishwasher safe or not.
Well metafields are there for that!
All you have to do is go to your product in the back office and add the metafield with the type, namespace and key that suits you. Here an arbitrary example for indication.
You can use almost anything you want in the namespace and key fields, the main thing is to find your way around.
Once the field has been created for the product, it must be added to the product sheet template, you can call on a Shopify expert like Pikka to modify your theme if necessary if you don't know how.
Here we add the metafield in the code, a little before the description for example
And once on the site: the customer will see the metafield appear on the products where it is present.
Be careful though, you will have to create the metafield on all the corresponding products if you want to see the information appear. And of course, you have to keep the same value of Global and Namespace otherwise Shopify will consider it another metafield.
V1 metafields in Shopify
Shopify has been using metafields for a long time to allow e-merchants to modify and personalize their e-commerce site. However, since June 2021, the metafields have received a major improvement: the V2 metafields appeared at the same time as the V2 onlinestore which we will detail in a future article.
Originally, there were only 3 types of metafield for shops:
- JSONs
- character strings (string)
- Integers
Even if they remain 100% functional today for all those who use them, it is advisable to migrate the V1 metafields to their version 2 which is more complete.
Indeed, V1 metafields in Shopify are now considered obsolete by Shopify itself.
But as usual with Shopify, even if you don't update your theme or metafields, they will continue to work for months or even years without issue. The new generation of metafield being indeed a “boosted” version but operating on the same principle.
V2 metafields in the Online store V2
But then what is the point of V2 metafields and why improve something that worked very well?
Well now, there are 18 types of metafield instead of 3 and they each have a different and more precise behavior. They will be used to make even more modifications and customization on your e-commerce front end and, great news, they are now accessible directly on the Shopify back office without going through an app.
We will see that metafield apps are still extremely useful, but if your theme is a V2 theme, then you can add or use metafields directly from your product pages, for example.
What are the types of V2 metafields?
Here is the comprehensive list of V2 metafields that you can use right now on any Shopify or Shopify Plus store:
- Single line of text
- Multiple text lines
- product reference
- declination reference
- reference to a page
- reference to a file
- an integer
- a decimal number
- a date
- a specific moment of a day
- a reference to a url
- a json
- booleans
- a color
- a weight
- a volume
- a dimension
- a note
The idea behind this version two is to offer even more services and to specialize the metafields for even more customizations. For example, they will be of great use to Shopify developers more easily to create filters to sort products or to display product information.
For example, with V2 metafields, it is possible to create a product rating system without an application, which was impossible before.
Why use metafields?
Metafields are a way to customize your Shopify store without having to use custom code. Metafields can be used for a variety of different things, which can include the product information you want to display, your customer service hours, or how you want your contact form to work.
Example of using metafields on a French site. All characteristics are saved in metafields and dynamically injected into the front office for each product
Metafields are a great way for Shopify store owners who have zero coding knowledge to customize their stores and make them as unique as they want!
How to use metafields without Shopify?
To use metafields on Shopify, until now it was mandatory to use an application, there are free ones, because you could neither create nor modify metafields in the back office of Shopify.
Since summer 2021, if your theme is a V2 theme, you can create metafields directly from Shopify, although we recommend at pikka to have an application to manage them more easily.
To use a metafield you will need:
- Create a metafield on Shopify using an application or directly in your interface
- Fill the metafield with data, information compatible with its type (a json in a json, an integer in an integer, a text field in text lines etc.)
- Go and indicate in the code of your Shopify theme where the metafield must appear.
- Go see on your site, the metafield is there!
Of course, with a bit of Liquid code, graphical modifications, and programming language skills, metafields can be used for many, many things.
For example, for a customer we connected the PIM to Shopify and the PIM dumps thousands of Json on the products with additional information like recipe ideas, product info (is the product dishwasher safe etc. .), bullet points or features.
Almost the entire product sheet is made up of hundreds of metafields for each product and this allows, with the same page template, to have extremely complete and dynamic product sheets based on PIM information.
Of course, in the context of a large client, everything is automated, but it is possible to manage metafields in many ways.
Which applications to best use metafields?
We said it a little earlier, using an application to manage metafields is a real plus because you will save time and be more productive.
At Pikka, our favorite app for managing metafields today is Metafields Guru .
One would have thought that implementing metafields directly in the Shopify interface would have annihilated metafield apps, but the opposite happened!
Many, many apps have taken advantage of this to add even more functionality and value for Shopify customers.
We often use the free version of metafield Guru which is more than enough for our projects because we work a lot with automation.
But if you "do everything by hand", metafield guru offers a paid version to go faster. It's up to you, but the price can quickly skyrocket for large sites.
Metafield FAQs
Finally, here are the questions that come up the most when discussing metafields with clients. You can ask us in French your questions about metafields in the comments and we will add them to the article with pleasure!
How do I bulk import metafields?
This is certainly the most asked question to our technical team: how to bulk import metafields into Shopify? Well unfortunately, Shopify does not offer a free solution for this.
Even if there is a product import file, the format is fixed and you cannot add metafields. That's a shame. On the other hand, with an application like Matrixify (ex Excelify), you can mass add metafields to your store but you will need a paid subscription. The subscription starts from $20/month for the version allowing you to import up to 5,000 product lines per file.
You can split your master file into several subfiles of 5000 lines if necessary, otherwise there are more expensive versions of Matrixify.
With Metafields Guru, you can also import metafields files but the business model is not exactly the same. At Metafields Guru, a credit of 20,000 lines is granted to you every month with the $19 plan. If you load the catalog several times (to do tests for example) it could quickly cost you quite a lot.
We are of course impatiently awaiting the update of Shopify's product import file to be able to add metafields in bulk to all products, variants or others for free without having to go through an application.
How to bulk edit metafields?
If you want to mass edit already existing metafields in your store there are two main solutions:
Either go through an export and re-import system, a bit like explained in the previous paragraph.
Either mass data modification tools such as “Store Commander.”
Store commander has indeed been present for a few months in the Shopify universe and typically offers mass changes to information on its store.
For the moment, the price of store order is simple: 40 dollars per month, regardless of the volume or the use you make of it.
Synthesis on metafields
There is still a lot to say about metafields, which remain one of Shopify's main innovations to open up its SaaS platform as much as possible while keeping the advantages of SaaS. If you want to know more you can also consult our Shopify FAQ which details many more specific points to modify your Shopify site independently.
It is a slightly more modern form, sometimes called “open saas” to compile the advantages of open source and those of SaaS.
If you don't yet use metafields, I invite you to test them to form your own opinion, but if you have a somewhat complex project, product sheets with a lot of technical information, for example, or fairly specific needs for your store online, then Shopify and metafields are definitely a good answer to your problem!
Today, it remains a fairly technical tool that requires fairly advanced Shopify skills to be implemented directly on an e-commerce site. Do not hesitate to contact us to find out more and carry out a free study of your project.
