Metafield
A metafield is an extra field you add to a Shopify product, or other record, to hold a detail its built-in fields have no place for.
- Custom field
What it means
Shopify’s built-in product fields cover the basics, such as title, price and SKU. A metafield adds a field of your own for anything else. Shopify’s developer documentation says metafields let you “add custom data to any Shopify resource”. Its examples include warranty information and care instructions on a product.12
Each metafield has a name, a value and a type, such as text, number or date.1 Set one up with what Shopify calls a definition, and it gets an editor in the admin that suits its type, with values checked when saved. Without a definition, the value is stored as plain text that cannot be searched or validated.2
Category metafields come with a category from the Shopify Standard Product Taxonomy. Assign the category, and the product gets that category’s own attributes as metafields.3
Think of it like this
Adding a metafield is like adding your own box to a printed form. The form already has Name and Address. You add Warranty, and every copy from then on has that box in the same place.
For example
A supplier puts a hoodie’s washing instructions at the end of its description. Moved into a care instructions metafield, they become a field of their own that a theme can show in a set place on the product page.2 Shopify even offers a ready-made “standard” definition for care instructions.1
Why it matters
A metafield only matters if something reads it. Shopify’s product CSV has Google Shopping columns, such as gender, age group and MPN. They are metafields an app might read, yet Shopify’s own Google and YouTube channel “doesn’t use these metafields”.4 Check what will read a metafield before you fill it.
Not to be confused with
A metafield is not a tag. Tags are loose keywords, separated by commas,4 while a metafield is a named field with a value of a set type. That is why it suits an attribute such as material or capacity.
Sources
- Shopify.dev. About metafields.
- Shopify.dev. Custom data.
- Shopify Help Center. Shopify’s Standard Product Taxonomy.
- Shopify Help Center. Using CSV files to import and export products.