Best way to create filters for a product that on the front-end of the shop?

Shopify Discussion

Topic summary

A Shopify store owner is struggling to implement product filters for graded trading cards that belong to multiple franchises or series simultaneously.

The Core Problem:

  • When using variants to represent multiple franchise categories (e.g., “ABC” and “XYZ”) for a single physical item, inventory management breaks down
  • Setting inventory to 1 for one variant and 0 for another incorrectly shows items as out of stock
  • Setting both to 1 creates false inventory counts (showing 2 items when only 1 exists)

Attempted Solutions:

  • Explored Shopify’s Search & Discovery app for filter creation, but variant-based filters don’t solve the multi-category issue
  • Considered custom metafields as a potential solution but is unsure how to add custom fields to existing product categories like “Non-Sports Trading Cards”

Current Status:
The discussion remains open with the original poster seeking guidance on the proper implementation method for custom metafields or alternative filtering approaches.

Summarized with AI on October 28. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

Let’s say I want to create filters for the customer to filter out products when browsing. For example, lets say I want the filter option available to the customer to be “Franchise” or “Series” and it’s a graded trading card slab. You have a graded card that belongs to a franchise or series “ABC” and it also belongs to franchise or series “XYZ” as well. Maybe XYZ is the sub category of ABC.

So if I set up variants and I create two entries for it, one being ABC and the other being XYZ, and it’s a single item, well the problem I run into is that if I have the amount available as 1 for ABC and 0 for XYZ, it will show XYZ as out of stock. If I change XYZ to 1, well, now I have two items in stock when it really is just one.

Within Search & Discovery when I go to create a filter, the options are the variants that I create which ends up being a problem if you try to have two for the same product, or other values that don’t quite fit. Maybe if I could add custom category metafields to “Non-Sports Trading Cards” but I don’t see an option to add a custom field to it.

What’s the best way to go about doing this?

2

Thanks for replying! Like I mentioned in the initial post, that creating metafields seemed like a solution. But how does one go about making custom ones to an existing category?

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