An introduction to Metafields

Where to start?

Metafields sound technical, but with a bit of time they can be simple to understand. At the core, they’re about adding additional information into your admin or storefront that doesn’t come standard across Shopify’s platform. Many businesses have specific needs that are unique to what they sell, their customers and their business goals. We created Metafields to help you customize and manage the information you need to grow your business to match your ambition. 

While metafields are easy to understand, creating a metafield strategy and taking the time to deploy it effectively can be time consuming. That's where you come in. As a Shopify partner, you can help guide metafield strategy and / or put it into action. 

In Summary,

Metafields are about sharing the right content with the right audience in the right context. They offer a simple, flexible way to build a personalized storefront and deliver experiences that delight new and returning customers—and keep them coming back for more. You can also help your clients use Metafields to organize your back office operations by centralizing data like customer details, shipping information, and inter-departmental notes. The best part? You can deliver all of these benefits without writing any code. With just a few clicks, you can create and reuse customized data-collection fields, and add them to your admin or to your online store, without touching a line of code. 

With Metafields, all of your store’s unique data —whether it’s related to customer birthdays, care instructions, material lists, or the packaging requirements for orders—has the potential to become actionable insights for any ecommerce business.

Shopify’s Metafields also extend the search and discovery aspects of the store. By adding Metafields to products, and creating new filters in the Shopify admin, it opened a world of filtering options for shoppers. The Metafields act as a type of tag system, classifying product types into easily sortable categories using the storefront’s search feature.

Metafield Lists

Use Metafield lists to show multiple pieces of content in one metafield, for example a list of ingredients. You can also use lists for more powerful storefront filtering–all through the admin without any coding. Learn more at the Shopify Help Center.