Catalog & data

Metafield

Definition

Shopify's native mechanism for structured custom product data — a typed, named field (material, fit, dishwasher_safe) attached to a product, variant, or category, defined once and readable by themes, Search & Discovery filters, APIs, and AI surfaces.

Defined in Shopify Metafields vs. a PIM: Where Should Product Data Live?.

Where Metafield comes up

The guides that put this term to work, rather than just defining it.

Related terms

Structured attribute: A named, machine-readable field with a discrete value — material: leather, sleeve_length: short — as opposed to the same fact buried in a marketing sentence.
Shopify metafield: A custom structured field on a Shopify product, collection, or variant — the mechanism most mid-market merchants use to add attributes without a separate PIM.
Category attribute template: A fixed, reusable list of the attribute fields every SKU in a given category must carry — e.g. every hiking boot gets material, closure, waterproof rating, sole type, weight — built once per category and then applied to every SKU in it.
Product taxonomy: The hierarchical category structure a catalog is organized under, which agents use to scope what "kind" of product they're reasoning about before checking specific attributes.
Backend attribute: Amazon search terms and fields that aren't shown on the listing but still feed indexing and, increasingly, Rufus's ability to answer questions about the product.
Shopping-context alt text: Alt text written to answer a shopper's implicit question about that specific image — what product, which attribute, what context — rather than to maximize keyword density for search ranking.

All 112 terms

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