A user migrating to Shopify 2.0 needs to bulk add metafields to products for filtering functionality, as the new theme uses metafields instead of tags. They have many products with no existing metafields.
Available Solutions:
Third-party apps: Ablestar Bulk Product Editor offers bulk metafield editing on its free plan, with options to filter by tags and update metafields, or export/import via spreadsheet for complex migrations. A walkthrough video is provided.
Native Shopify feature: Shopify recently released limited bulk editing for product metafields directly in the admin panel. However, users report significant issues—error messages when saving don’t indicate where problems exist, making corrections impossible.
Alternative approach: Some apps like ‘Product Filter & Search’ allow retaining tag-based filtering instead of converting to metafields.
Ongoing Issues:
One user reports that bulk-edited metafield data isn’t carrying over to individual product variants when using Google Shopping metafields (age_group, condition, gender, mpn), suggesting the native feature may have additional limitations or bugs. The discussion remains open with unresolved technical challenges around Shopify’s native bulk editing functionality.
This sounds promising. We also need to do a lot of editing of metafields. I’d like to test this out on my dev store. do you know if the app is free on dev stores. I don’t really want to pay for acceptance testing, but if successful would move it over to live to do our full collection.
Thanks