Metafield limitations and workarounds - please help!

I’ve gone back and forth with Shopify on this multiple times and can’t seem to get through in any way. I’m hoping someone from the community can help me.

Our company sells watch bracelets. We make a bracelet for a specific model watch, but sometimes we hear from our customers that the bracelet will work on a different model. Right now, we are using a 3rd party app to track all of this compatibility in a chart. However, it’s clunky and difficult to navigate.

I would like to disseminate all of this chart data into individual product listings. So when you go to Product A, which is designed for Watch 1 (but also works on Watch 2 & 3), you will see a listing of Watch 1, 2, 3. I would like for this information to be searchable across the website and by search crawlers, so someone doing a Google search for “Watch 3 bracelets” would arrive on the Product A page.

The easy way to do that would just be to update the descriptions, but that has its own design limitations and muddies up the listing pages. Shopify seems to be moving in the direction of Metafields and reusable data, so I would prefer to “do this right” if there is potential for future re-usability. However, it seems as if Metafields are not searchable and not indexable. The only workaround I can think of is to add a corresponding tag to the product at the same time, but unless there’s a way to automate that, it is not realistic.

Does anyone know of a way to use Shopify Flow to automate this pairing of product level metafields and tags? Or is there another solution I’m not thinking of? It seems like a common problem that other users would have faced, but so far I have not been able to get any solid support. TIA

Hi Rybo,

There is a number of ways to achieve what you are trying to do. Most of the options that come to mind would require you to make small changes to you product template code.

The good news is you are on the right track. Metafields /product tags would be my go to route based on how you described the issue.

A few things to keep in mind the

  1. Using metafields: The product metafields in shopify are different from the HTML meta fields - These are used to add custom fields like what you are trying to do. Eg: Add “also fits Watch 2, Watch 3…”
    These metafields can be displayed anywhere on the page and hence crawlable by search engines. This would easily help you to create an organized way of showing which watches are compatible with your products
  2. Using tags: You can use tags and create collections based on these tags and then add them to your navigation menu. On these collection pages you can add watch specific SEO content for better indexing. This option is more SEO friendly and does not require any coding.
    If you are comfortable, with code, you can take it a step further and display something like: this watch also fits watch 2 & watch 3on the page.

Do let me know if you need any help with this. I’d be happy to look at your website.