In Shopify, a metafield is simply a custom field created and added to any of the following content: Customers, Orders, Products, Variants, Collections, Pages, Blogs, Blog Posts.
Metafields have been around for many years in Shopify, but until last summer you had to use a third-party App to create and manipulate them. Their use was therefore rather confidential, and reserved for experienced users.
Since July 2021, a dedicated menu for metafields has been added in the back office (in Settings). It is now possible to manage metafields natively in Shopify, without installing an App.
More and more use cases for metafields
Beyond the ease of use, the fact that the metafields are now directly accessible has made them specified in many more use cases.
In particular thanks to the dynamic display of metafields feature, now available in the theme editor, which allows you to add metafields to the visible content of the site, without the need to write or modify code.
Particularly useful for product pages
For many merchants, the first use of metafields is for products, with the addition of additional information: data from the merchant's organization (an ERP reference for example), or information useful to buyers and which will be displayed on the product pages (care tips, ingredients, etc.).
It is all the more interesting to use metafields that the new native filter management feature for collection pages takes into account product metafields, thus allowing you to further customize the filtering options.
Increasingly used instead of tags
Metafields contents can be translated, based on the languages enabled and published in Shopify. This is not possible with another widely used tool in Shopify, tags. As a result, data that was preferably stored using tags, is now stored in metafields, making management easier for international projects.
For more information on metafields, go to Shopify online documentation.
To discuss metafields and their different uses in Shopify, feel free to contact us.
