How to add custom fields (metafields) to a Shopify product catalog

Shopify supports metafields, which allow you to add custom fields to your product catalog. Metafields can be attached to both product and product variant resources.

Our system always loads product-level metafields. If you need access to variant-level metafields, please contact us and we can turn on that setting. It slows down the feeds and is rarely needed, which is why it is not turned on by default. We also can load collection-level metafields if needed.

Shopify does not provide a way to add and edit the metafields out of the box, but you can install the free Metafields Master app to allow you to do this easily.

Common custom fields you may want to add are google_product_category, gender, age_group, and promotion_id. Below are instructions for adding a google_product_category to a product. Similar instructions apply to other metafield apps, like the tried and true Metafields Editor, which no longer has a free plan for new customers.

1. Launch the Metafields Master app
2. Click on Products
3. Click on a particular product
4. Click the Create New button
5. Enter the following:
   Namespace = google
   Key = product_category
   Description = leave blank
   Type = String
   Value = Home & Garden
6. Click the Save button

To quickly look up Google Product Category values for your items, go to Manage Feed > Taxonomy Search and start typing to find categories matching your search strings as you type.

Click the Refresh button from the Manage Feed page to load the data into our system. Namespace and Key are combined to create a field named google_product_category, which can be mapped to any feed attribute from the Manage Feed > Define Fields page.

Here are some recommended metafield names for some other commonly used fields:

You can also bulk load metafields using an Excel spreadsheet. Although it is beyond the scope of this article, we highly recommend learning how to do this, as it will save you considerable time versus adding metafields one-by-one to individual products. If you need a starter template (Excel), please contact us.