Adding Internal Notes on Product Pages for Inventory

[ArtDept1]

I'm interested in adding a text box on shopify product pages (NOT for our customer-facing website, but for our internal inventory product pages). It would be nice to be able to add notes that can be shared between employees, i.e. be sure to update Cost Per Item when new order arrives, item needs to have barcode updated, etc. Another way we would use it is to track when we ordered items last and keep notes internally of shipping costs and any changes made to the product, as the adjustment history only goes back 30 days.

As far as I know, the internal product pages are not customizable, but perhaps is there an app that could do this for me? Or maybe enough people would be interested in this feature that shopify could update their back end so retailers have a simple text box in their product pages.

Thanks!

[ArtDept1]

Thank you! When I search for those apps in the app store, I don't see either showing up. Can you please link to them? 

[PaulNewton]

The current most similar feature are things like the timeline comments you'd find on order pages.

Submit feature requests directly to shopify

https://help.shopify.com/en/support/login 

For the admin backend mainly it's really handled by staff working in another tools like airtable, google sheets ,appsmith, retool , etc.

Where on a day to day basis staff never even touches shopify the product admin.

Beyond that it's handled via custom browser extensions that either adds an overlay to the page or adds elements. Or making a custom admin app that staff uses that has commenting and management features; or even a special custom utility theme that's locked down and using the blog comment features. 

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@ArtDept1 wrote:

i.e. be sure to update Cost Per Item when new order arrives  item needs to have barcode updated, etc

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Alot of that can be handled with shopify-flow, those are things that should be more than likely just  be automated to send staff reminder notifications, not something left to chance by being post-it note discussions buried in one specific products admin page. Imagine if you left a note in a product to update the price in a critical way, that note only EVER gets seen if staff is specifically viewing that products admin; that's then a point of failure not a feature benefit.

[ArtDept1]

We have tried google sheets and it is not working the way I would like it to. For our situation, a "sticky note" on each product page is ideal for us. On a day to day basis, our employees do work with the product admin. Not all businesses are run the same and this is what works best for us. I will look into Shopify flow, thank you for the suggestion. 

[Kyle_W]

Hey @ArtDept1!

Shopify has recently made it possible to view and edit metafield data directly in the Shopify admin, meaning you can add a text box (or multiple text boxes) to product pages. Although it's common for metafield data to be displayed on the storefront via theme customizations, you can also use metafields internally without exposing the data to customers. 

I'd suggest checking out Shopify's docs on metafields and pinned definitions for more details.

Hopefully this helps!

[ArtDept1]

Thanks so much! This looks like exactly what we need. I will dive into some tutorials on this 🙂

[Cherie35]

Hi, just wondering if you ever got this sorted?

I would also love an area on the product page for making notes that only I can see (not visible on the website)

Look forward to hearing if you had success, cheers

[PaulNewton]

Hi @Cherie35 👋 See metafield definitions

https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/custom-data/metafields/metafield-definitions 

Keep in mind most of those UI's will only allow for a small part of text to show in the product admin itself, for long notes you have to click into the metafield, or alternatively use metaobjects and thier entries.