Shared metafields

Shared Metafields are available on Premium plans and above.

BigCommerce metafields are a powerful way to store data against products, categories, etc. However, adding the same metafields to every product is cumbersome and error-prone.

What if you could define all your product metafields in advance, along with their expected content type? What if you could make quick edits directly from the products view in BigCommerce?

Shared Metafields drastically simplifies metafields management, making day-to-day operations quicker and easier.

Add your shared metafields

Choose the resource (category, brands, product, variants, channels, orders), choose "Manage shared metafields" and hit "Add shared metafield".

You will then be ready to define the shared metafield options.

The options available are:

Name	A friendly name for your field
Namespace	The combination of the namespace and key is the unique identifier for your field in BigCommerce. Typically the namespace is a way of grouping keys. You might simply choose "shared".
Key	The combination of the namespace and key is the unique identifier for your field in BigCommerce. The key is a short name for you field that must be unique per namespace. It cannot include spaces.
Description	An optional short description. It will be shown when editing metafields
Content type	The exciting bit! This allows you to say what type of data should be put in this field. This helps us to show the right kind of input when editing. The supported content types are: Text Rich Text (WYSIWYG) Brand Category Checkbox Color Date Date & Time Decimal File HTML JSON Number Page Product Select (define your own options) URL
Single/List	For some content types, you can choose whether it should be a single or list of items, e.g. single product or list of products
Option values	For the select content type, you can then define the list of valid options that can be assigned to the field.
Use on storefront	A developer can display metafields on your storefront by adding some code to the theme. This setting needs to be enabled to add it to the GraphQL API response.

Once you've created your first metafield, feel free to continue adding more to complete your list.

Developer note

We provide an example GraphQL query to access your shared metafields on the storefront. Find it by clicking the three dots at the top of the page.

Follow our guides for using metafields to the storefront.

Edit shared metafields

Once you've added some shared metafields, when you open the associated resource, e.g. products, and choose an item, you will then be presented with a form to update all the shared metafields at once.

The example below shows a list of shared metafields on channels which are being used as "store settings".

You can continue to manage metafields that are not shared between items. These are shown in the "Custom metafields" tab.

Quick edit shared metafields

Once you've configured your shared metafields, you can use the Quick Edit feature from the Products and Orders screen within BigCommerce admin.

This view can be found by clicking the three dots at the end of a product row and choosing the Metafields Manager - Quick Edit option.

Note that in this view you can also make changes to custom metafields, i.e. ones that only exist on this product.

To change the order of fields, go to Manage Shared Metafields and drag and drop them into the desired order.

Import/export shared metafields

To update shared metafields across items in bulk, you can use the regular import/export functionality. When doing so, choose the "Shared" import/export type. This uses a spreadsheet where each row is an item, e.g. product, and each column is a shared metafield.