Material Retail Dumps

Welcome to the Material Retail Dumps Podcast. If you've listened to us before, thanks so much for coming back. If it's your first time listening, welcome Material Retail Dumps is a short form podcast with brief but valuable content for independent retailers. As business owners, we don't have time for a 30 minute lesson with a ton of banter, so we get straight to the meat of the topic and aim to give you actionable information that will help you optimize your retail operation and make more money every day. Welcome to Material Retail Dumps, episode 47. This episode is about Shopify meta fields. We'll talk about what they are, why you should use them, and then how to implement them. As always, we'll keep it quick. There's a ton of information on this topic. Hopefully this is an introduction that will really get you to believe that you need to use meta fields, because it can change a lot in your e-commerce journey.

All right, so first of all, what is a meta field? What are we even talking about? So, meta fields are a custom field or a custom property that you can add inside of Shopify and attach to products or collections, or even customers. So to keep it simple, we're gonna talk about it in the context of adding products. So when you use Shopify or any other system and you add products, you're limited to the fields that they allow you to use. So generally those may be, you know, color or size or tags, product type, things like that. It's flexible, but you know, it's not custom. You can't do whatever you want. So a meta field allows you to do whatever you want. For example, if you're a fashion retailer, you may wanna have a hierarchy of five different categories. You may wanna have, you know, first category is, you know, whether it's men's or women's or children's.

Second category, it's whether it is clothing or accessories or shoes. Third category is whether it's, you know, a dress or top or pants. Fourth category, is it a sweater or a tank? Top and fifth category, is it a V-neck or a crew neck? And then now you have these set up, you can add those five categories to each product. Now you'll have, you know, hundreds of products with that information, and you can easily use that information when setting up your website to basically merchandise or do other things with that information. Why do we need to use meta fields? The answer to that question is, you know, there's really no answer to that question, right? The answer is, if you have an idea that you wanna implement on your website, you could probably do it with a meta field. I'm gonna give you a great example in the context of being a clothing retailer.

So when you sell clothing, especially when you sell it online, you'll enter in the color information. So let's say we get a dress. That dress comes in black and blue. We'll put in color name, maybe that color name will be Navy. We'll call the black Color Dark Knight because the vendor, they call it Dark Knight, and we wanna go reorder it. We need to see Dark Knight because they don't know black, they know Dark Knight. Now, you know, think about that. Across hundreds of products, you might have a couple of hundred different color names in

Your system. I, you know, we set up a Shopify store a few weeks ago, and when we went to go filter by color for that store, that store actually had 695 different color names. Let's take it a step further. If I'm a business owner and I have hundreds or thousands of products, and I wanna show the customer those products, I wanna give them the ability to filter by color. So I add a color filter to my collection pages. Now, if customer clicks on that color filter and they see 695 options, and some of those options don't even make sense. What does Dark Knight even mean? Is it navy blue or is it black? How about, we've seen colors called prestige, they have a problem, right? You wanna give your customer the ability to filter by color, but they can't because it's impossible to use the way you did it.

How do we solve that problem? We solve that problem using meta fields. So we create a variant meta field, a variant level meta field, that's what it's called. We call it color. And when you set up this meta field, you're gonna set up a rigid system for the meta field. So you're gonna have the color blue. You're not gonna have navy light blue, sky blue, deep blue. It's just blue. And you're gonna list out those colors as primary colors. Blue, black, red, orange, pink. You know, it's probably 15 colors, primary colors. And those are to be the only choices. There are no other choices. And you lock that. Once it's locked and you add a product, okay, you call your your product Dark Knight, and you go, when you're adding the variant, you add the meta field to that variant of black. All your weird color names are assigned a base color that has the proper name.

So now when you set up your product filters, the customers can click on blue and they'll see your navy blues, your light blues, your sky blues, and any other blues you have. And if, again, if you're in fashion retail, you know that color names are just sometimes downright silly. Another thing that this will allow you to do, which is really cool, or you implemented this meta field system and customer filters by blue. And you know you have products with multiple colors. So you know, maybe there's five products that have, you know, five different colors. Each customer filters by blue. They're not gonna see the blue picture in front of 'em, right? They might see the orange picture. If you implement the color meta field on each variant, and then the customer filters by blue, Shopify will be smart enough to show the customer all the blue variants.

You'll see a nice pretty blue page. So how do you implement meta fields? You know, it might sound complicated, but it's super easy. You literally just go to Shopify, you click on settings, and you click Custom data, and then you create your meta fields. We'll do a couple of, uh, videos and podcasts about this and give some more information. But it's all really easy to find online, and there's a ton of help articles about it. And if you're looking to, if you're really looking to bring the merchandising of your website, the organization, and just the functionality of your website to the next level, you need to be using meta fields. And if you're not, you're falling behind. Real quick, thanks for listening. We're looking forward to the next episode.