Organize Your Products Like a Rainbow: Metafields and Color Sorting

[Skye]

You've downloaded the Search & Discovery app from the Shopify App store, and as you're celebrating these developments, you notice something - how do you manage to sort by color?!' Don't worry, it's easier than you think and we're happy to help you through it! 

Today we’ll go through the steps together so that you can sort your products by color which not only is visually appealing, but also makes sorting easier. You’ll learn step by step how to create meta fields, how to add them to your products and how to ensure that they then become available as a filter on your website.

Create metafields

Within your Shopify Admin when you click on Settings > Custom Data  menu option. When you select this, you can create metafields for the following areas within your store. 

• Products
• Variants
• Collections
• Customers
• Orders
• Businesses
• Business locations
• Locations
• Pages
• Blogs
• Blog posts
• Markets

We’ll now create a meta field together to sort your products by color. To create this meta field you’ll need to create a meta field for the Products section.

1. Click the green “Add Definition” button.
2. Add a name for your meta field, ex Color.
3. Enter the description of your meta field. 
4. Select the metafield type, which in this example is Single Line Text. 

Once you’ve created your meta field, you can further configure it within your product or variant. You do this by going through the following steps.

1. Open your Products overview
2. Select the product to which you want to add a meta field. 
3. Select the variant you want to add this metafield to
4. Click edit. 
• If your product has no variants, scroll to the bottom of the page.
5. You will see the Metafields heading at the bottom of the page. Under Color, enter the color you want this specific product or variant to be sorted by.

Now all you have to do is make sure that your meta field is visible on your website. You do this by adding your meta field as a filter within the Search & Discovery app by going through the following steps.

1. Within your Admin center, click Online Store > Navigate.
2. Under Filters, open the Search and Discovery App
3. Select Add Filter and the new metafield you have created; add it as a filter
4. Save the change

Your filter will be visible on your website, allowing your customers to be able to filter your products by color.

And that's how you add a color filter to your store!

Simple, right? If you want to read more about meta fields and how you can use them for your store, take a look at our Shopify Help Center article about meta fields.