What are BigCommerce metafields
BigCommerce metafields add more flexibility to the store as it allows store owners to add custom data to their products, customers, orders, and other resources in the BigCommerce store. Utilizing this data can add more custom experience for your targeted audience.
What are the benefits of using BigCommerce metafields?
The benefits of using BigCommerce metafields include:
Customization: Metafields enable store owners to add custom information to their store resources, which can be used to extend and personalize the functionality of their store.
Flexibility: Metafields allow store owners to store any type of data, including text, numbers, images, and more. This makes them a flexible solution for adding custom data to a store.
Integration: Metafields can be easily integrated with other third-party apps and services, allowing store owners to extend their store's functionality and automate certain processes.
Improved organization: Metafields allow store owners to organize their data in a more structured and manageable way, making it easier to find and use the information they need.
How do I access and use the data stored in a BigCommerce metafield?
Without the use of a metafield manager app like this one created by groove, in order to access and use the data stored in a BigCommerce metafield, you'll need to use the BigCommerce Management API.
Note: To access the BigCommerce API, you'll need to have a BigCommerce API key and an understanding of how to make API requests.
What are some common use cases for BigCommerce metafields
The specific use cases will depend on the needs and goals of a particular store. Here are some common use cases for BigCommerce metafields:
Product customization: Store owners can use metafields to store additional information about their products, such as custom product descriptions, specifications, or images.
Order management: Store owners can use metafields to store additional information about orders, such as order notes, delivery instructions, or custom order statuses.
Third-party app integration: Metafields can be used to store data required by third-party apps or services, such as tracking information for shipping carriers or customer review scores.
Header tag customization: Metafields can be used to generate customized H1 tags on category pages, offering increased flexibility for SEO.
How does using BigCommerce metafields impact the performance of my store?
In general, accessing and using metafield data will require additional resources and processing time. This is because metafield data is stored outside of the main data structure of your store, and retrieving the data requires making additional API requests to the BigCommerce API.
BigCommerce does allow a faster and easier way to access metafields to be used within the theme by using graphQL. However, this is limited to certain resources such as products and categories. Some resources may require a more involved process to retrieve the value, checkout BigCommerce GraphQL API Reference to learn more about the capability.
Is there a maximum number of metafields I can create for each resource in my store?
The maximum number of metafields allowed on each order, product, category, variant, or brand is 250 per client ID.
What are the limitations to BigCommerce metafields?
Storage limit: Each metafield can store up to 65535 characters of data for the value and up to 256 for the description.
Resource limits: Each resource, such as a product or category, can have up to 250 metafields associated with it. If you need to store more metafields, you may need to consider using a separate database.
Naming restrictions: The namespaces, keys, and values of metafields are case-sensitive and can only contain alphanumeric characters, underscores, and hyphens. Spaces and special characters are not allowed.