How to best require a custom metafield during product listing creation?

Store Design
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1

Hi all -

We have a custom product metafield which is critical for our listings. It is really REALLY important that it gets filled out when admin add a product in the interface.

Unfortunately - and despite training our staff - it sometimes gets missed out: the field is further down the product creation page, and there’s no immediate way to make it a required field.

I’m exploring alternative approaches to avoid this.

  • This custom field/value doesn’t HAVE to be a metafield.
  • Using a custom app to extend the admin interface seems like overkill.

Does anybody have any good suggestions to REQUIRE a custom field while adding products in Shopify? In other words, the value has to be validated before the product will even be created? Or at the very least, it lets admin know when we’ve missed it out?

2

Hi @eggplanted

Unfortunately, you need an app to do this. You can possibly use free Shopify flow for this. You can set it to notify via email when the said metafield was left blank

3

Oooh that’s a smart idea, might be just enough to get compliance! Thanks!

4

Yes, no need to hire a developer nor have a monthly recurring payment :grinning_face:

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5

Hi @eggplanted :waving_hand: Quickest band-aid is use shopify-flow to make sure new products stay unpublished and don’t get autopublished until they get a “release” tag, etc such as from a team lead etc.

After that then read on, and build up the rest of the process validating metafields.

This is the type of stuff you want to bookend with checks before time of creation, with validation afterward as redundancy not the critical authorship step itself.

Getting emails should only happen IF something goes wrong, otherwise you don’t want staff getting constant emails to be a baked in part of the authorship process.

Email roundtripping can be the worst type of automation kludge avoid it or make it highly polished.

Upstream fix,

For product creation try to always fix it at the source such as instead of allowing admin access for every staff making product entry done through a spreadsheets that have constraint validation etc. And then do standard CSV product import from the spreadsheet

Or automate the import itself with online excel/gsheet spreadsheet and an app to automate the import of CSV rows only when valid.

Such as with mechanic scripting, matrifixy, or ez-exporter apps.

export examples https://tasks.mechanic.dev/?q=CSV&tags=CSV

If the data is part of other product data, such as descriptions or calculated from productOptions etc, then that is something to automate before allowing creation/publishing.

Unless there’s some reason the data cannot be generated until after a product is created published; i.e. apps that add tags or taxonomy categorization etc making it a downstream process.

Downstream fix,

You can kick of validation processes AFTER a product is created using shopify-flow or other automation apps but that still means there is a gap of time products are invalid and 1 more check you or staff still need human eyes on; compounded by any auto-publishing to channels by settings or apps etc.

sample tasks for mechanic https://tasks.mechanic.dev/?q=missing

If you need this type of process automation , or consulting then contact me for services
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