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What are metafields
Nick Paul avatar
Written by Nick Paul
Updated over a year ago

Metafields

Metafields help you to customize the functionality and appearance of your Shopify store by letting you save specialized information that isn't usually captured in the Shopify admin. You can use metafields for internal tracking, or to display specialized information on your online store in a variety of ways. For example, a candle seller might want to display a burn time for candles on their product pages, while a grocery store might want to display a product expiration date for canned goods. Other examples of specialized information include the following:

  • part numbers

  • color swatches

  • launch dates

  • related products

  • blog post summaries

  • files for download

  • lists of ingredients

You can add metafields to your products, collections, customers, orders, and other parts of your store, directly from your Shopify admin.

Learn more about using metafields.

Note

This is an advanced tutorial. If you need help with setting up your metafields or connecting them to your theme, then you can hire a Shopify Expert. Learn more about hiring Shopify Experts.

Setting up new metafields involves the following tasks:

  1. Adding metafield definitions to add fields for your specialized information to pages in your Shopify admin

  2. Adding metafield values to parts of your store, such as products or variants

  3. Optional: Connecting metafields to your theme to display specialized information on your online store

You can also migrate existing metafields to a definition. Adding definitions for sets of metafields enforces validation rules to ensure that your metafield values are consistent and reliable. If your metafield values don't match the validation rules for your definition, then you can fix invalid metafield values after migration.

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