Flea market POS scenario with multiple dealers using a single checkout, where products aren’t added to Shopify due to frequent changes; every transaction is a POS “custom sale” (manually entered item outside the catalog).
Need: Attach a dealer/vendor identifier to each custom sale line to handle payouts and commissions.
Issue: Shopify POS custom sale doesn’t provide fields for vendor/tag/metafields (metafields = custom data fields). Guidance encountered suggests this isn’t supported natively.
Current workaround considered: Add a text-based vendor ID into the item name at checkout (e.g., “Product _ vendor-#”), but this likely breaks or complicates reporting.
No suitable apps found to add structured vendor data to custom sale items.
Request: Seeking a way—ideally via metafields or similar—to reliably capture vendor per custom sale for reporting and payment. Status: unresolved; open for solutions.
I have a flea market setup: multiple dealers, each with their own products that never get entered into Shopify as they change too frequently. There is a single checkout point at the market.
We are switching from an old MS solution to Shopify, but when adding a “custom sale” (every item will be a custom sale) we need to somehow tag the dealer so we can pay them, and take our commssion.
Everything I’ve seen so far says this isn’t possible short of adding some sort of text-tag to the name of the product at the time of sale (ie. This Fancy Product *_*vendor-#), which in turn may be tricky when it comes to reporting? There don’t seem to be any apps. I’ve seen a ton of requests for this, is there no way to add some sort of metafield or something? Any help appreciated.
Another option could be to have a single zero-priced product per vendor.
Simply add it to the order on POS,
then run a Flow (free automation app from Shopify) to add a tag/metafield to entire order based on presence of this “marker” product so you can properly attribute this sale.
Ciara here from Better Reports. I noticed that your question hadn’t been solved yet, so I thought I’d try to add some context.
Custom sale products/items don’t get stored in Shopify on the Product/Product variants tables. These tables are where elements like tags, vendor, product type, or metafields can be stored. Without a record on this table, custom sales can be limited to just the product and variant name used.
You mentioned a solution you found, which would be to ask the vendor to add a set prefix to the product, like -VENDORNAME or _VENDORNAME. This solution would work so long as your vendors stick to the same format and spellings every time.
You could export a list of product/variant level order details and perform some Excel/Google Sheets formula to split the product name into two columns using the prefix pattern you’ve established.
Or @tim_1’s solution would work where you can set up a $0 product in your Shopify for each vendor name and ask the vendor to add it to every order they process. We can even create a custom field that would show this vendor name for every row on an order, similar to a ‘Vendor’ field.