Metafields and metaobjects in plain words
Two Shopify features that let your team manage extra product information without touching code, and when to use which.
Shopify gives every product a title, description, price and images. Most stores need more than that: a size chart, ingredients, a care guide, a "made in" line. Metafields and metaobjects are where that extra information lives.
Metafields: extra fields on something that already exists
A metafield is a custom field you add to products, variants, collections, customers or the store itself. For example, a "fabric" text field on products. You fill it in on the product page in the admin, and the theme shows it on the product page of the store.
You define metafields in Settings, under Custom data. Defining them there gives each field a type (text, number, file, color, reference to another item) and makes them easy to fill in.
Metaobjects: your own content types
A metaobject is a new kind of entry you design yourself. Think of a "designer" with a name, photo and bio, or a "size chart" with its rows. You create each entry once and link it from products through a metafield. Ten products by the same designer point to one entry, so the bio gets updated in one place.
When to use which
- Information that belongs to one product only: a metafield.
- Information shared by many products, or with its own structure: a metaobject, linked with a metafield.
- Information that is the same for the whole store: a section setting or a shop metafield.
Showing them on the store
In an Online Store 2.0 theme you can connect many section settings to a metafield right in the theme editor, with the small connect icon next to the setting. When the theme has no place for the field yet, a developer adds a block that reads it.
Plan before you fill
Changing a field's type later isn't always possible, and fixing two hundred products by hand is slow. A short spreadsheet with the field name, its type and one example value takes ten minutes and saves a lot of rework.
We set up metafields and metaobjects as part of our Figma to Shopify builds, so content like size charts and specs is edited in one place.
