What are Metafields?
Metafields are custom fields of data that can be connected to any object in Shopify, whether that’s a product, collection, customer, page, blog post etc. If you were to look at a product for example, say you’re selling a car, you might say that the car has lots of properties, max speed, BHP, mileage etc.
Rather than writing these values into the description you can set them up as metafields. By doing this you can include them anywhere on the product page without them being a locked part of the description.
What’s a use case?
A recent use case was that a client wanted a product to have a different image when it was added to the cart vs when you were on the product page. By default Shopify will always show the products image in the cart because that makes sense for most people right? But this client had a specific cart image that they wanted to display.
We created a metafield on products called Cart Image that allowed the client to upload an image onto each product which would become the one visible in the cart. It used a simple from upload so it was really easy for us to show the client where they can control this extra product property and how they can upload an image there.
How do you see/edit metafields?
There are a lot of metafield apps in Shopify that you will need to install if you wish to start using them, our personal favourite is called Advanced Custom Fields. We think this one is the best for ease of use, it allows us to create all kinds of fields, we can even add a line of text under each field explaining to you how it is used. Once we’ve set it up using all of their awesome settings it’ll be a breeze for you to manage.