What are Shopify metafields?
First off, metafields are a little technical, so bear with us. Metafields basically allow you to associate specific fields of information with items in Shopify (e.g. like your products, blog posts, website pages, collections, etc).
The most common use of metafields is to showcase specific product information on your product pages. For exmaple, say you have a cookie shop and some of your products are gluten free and some aren't. You may want to show the gluten-free icon on your gluten-free cookie product pages but not on your non gluten-free pages. This is where you might have a metafield called "gluten free" associated with each product and the value would be "true" for your gluten free products.
If you're just looking for product badges (e.g. low stock, NEW, etc), there are actually apps specifically for that in our Product Badges apps category.
If you're looking to show specific specific product information, product-specific size charts, or product-specific FAQs, there are also apps that do that specifically in our Product Tabs category.
All of these apps are powered by metafields. If the Product Badges or Product Tabs solutions don't work for you and you're looking for a very customized product page experience and you need to associate specific extra fields with each product so you can customize your product page template, then a more robust metafields manager app is best for you.
Here's what to look for in metafields apps:
- Bulk editing: Depending on your product catalog size, you'll want an editor that lets you edit many products at once, as opposed to going to each product and adding fields one by one.
- Import/Export from CSV: For really big catalogs you may want to edit your metafields in a spreadsheet and then import the metafields data — this is super important and will save a tone of time and energy.
- Chrome extension: Some metafields editors have a chrome extension that let's you edit metafields directly while you're on the page for quick edits.
- Presets: Some metafields apps will let you save multiple fields as a "set" and then apply the set to many products at once. For example if you have specific shipping or sizing info fields for all t-shirts, you can create a t-shirt "set" of fields and values and apply it to all your t-shirts at once.
