Metafield / Metaobject

• Metafield: Shopify's mechanism for attaching custom attributes to existing resources — products, customers, orders, collections, and more — defined in the namespace.key format.
• Metaobject: A standalone custom data type not tied to any particular resource, for managing structured data such as brand information, store content, and reusable content modules.

Metafields are the first choice for business requirements that Shopify's standard fields cannot express — product subtitles, series names, search-exclusion flags, tier-specific attributes, and so on. They are accessible from themes, apps, and Flow alike, serving as a single source of truth. Metaobjects, by contrast, handle collections of records that exist independently — catalog-like data — making them the key to CMS-style use cases and sophisticated data modeling.

We design Metafields in nearly every project — for example, search-visibility flags and storage for benefit-granting logic. Choosing between Metafields and Metaobjects — carton-size management in B2B projects, content template definitions, and more — is a data modeling decision we make at the start of each engagement.