I’ve been reading through years of posts here about the lack of internal notes for products (like this thread from 2018, this one from 2020, etc.) and I’m considering building an app to solve this.
Before I invest the time, I want to make sure I understand the actual need.
The problem I keep seeing:
Merchants need to track internal information about products - supplier contacts, bin locations, quality issues, restock notes, recipe modifications - but there’s no good place in Shopify to put this information that’s:
Visible to staff
NOT visible to customers
Actually attached to the product (not in a separate spreadsheet)
Current workarounds I’ve seen mentioned:
Using metafields (requires coding knowledge)
Spreadsheets (get out of sync)
Hijacking the SKU or product description fields
Physical notebooks (only one person can access)
Just remembering (doesn’t scale with teams)
What I’m thinking of building:
An app that adds internal notes directly to your product pages in Shopify admin. Your team can add notes, search them, tag them, see who wrote what and when - basically treating product information the way you’d want it to work.
Where I need your help:
I put together a quick survey (2 minutes max) to understand:
What features would actually be useful vs “nice to have”
What you’d use these notes for
Whether variant-level notes matter (or just product-level)
For those who help: I’ll give you free early access when it’s built, and I’ll share the survey results back to this thread so you can see what other merchants said.
Thoughts? Is this something you’d find valuable, or are the current workarounds working fine for you?
Yes, this is a real and valuable idea. You’ve correctly identified a long-standing frustration for merchants.
You’re right about the workarounds. While Shopify’s built-in metafields no longer require code, the native interface is clunky, hidden, and not easily searchable. Your app’s true value isn’t just enabling notes, it’s providing a usable and efficient interface for them, which is a massive improvement.
Hi @PieLab, thanks for your feedback. If you have time i’d appreciate if you could do this brief survery for more tailored ideas around this topic that could greatly aid the final result: Shopify Internal Notes App . Otherwise, I had a question below.
Do you have any specific suggestion when it comes to usability and efficiency?
For example, I think that tagging and pinning of notes, and filtering based on author and tags could provide easy of access for merchants that use a lot of notes. However, I do not want to be narrow minded when it comes to listening to Merchants.
do you have in mind any specific improvements that could benefits merchants when it comes to internal notes on products?
Hi @tim_1 , Thanks for your feedback. There is no coding knowledge needed to use a metafield for notes. However, it’s a single field or at best a list of notes that have no date, no author, no ease of access and search, no possibility to perhaps group these with tags.
Hence, this app would be geared toward merchants that tend to have a lot of knowledge around products to be stored somewhere, or even simply a number of employees that need that communicate asyncronously between them and need a storage for information about products.
I really appreciate your criticism, and would like to know if you think metafield fully suffice for the purpose of taking notes. Any other feedback or question on my answer too, is very welcome!
