I have 4 Shopify stores that all sell the same products (US vs EU, and wholesale vs retail) I’m updating my theme and taking this as an opportunity to move from the mass product template model to metafields and one product template. One issue however is that I typically work by building the products in one store and then move them over to the rest with minor alterations. I tested that today and found that metafields that I built and assigned to my test product did not transfer when i uploaded via CSV.
Did I do something wrong? or are metafields really this limited and require and app to use effectively? (ps, not looking for app recommendations, so please don’t make any)
Hi @Kristen_Zephyru ,
Nope, you did nothing wrong - it’s just a limitation of Shopify’s import/export functionality. Not only are metafields missing in the default export file (scroll down to “Description of the product CSV file” to see the structure of a standard export file), but they will be ignored by the data import tool even if you add custom records to your file. The only exception is the Google Shopping metafields, as Shopify claims that they will get imported.
And that’s why merchants usually opt for third-party apps to handle bulk edits or data migrations. Since you would like to avoid using a third-party app, you may want to have your developer create a custom API-based (either GraphQL or REST) tool for metafields management.
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From my perspective it’s just dumb for shopify to add this feature and not provide even basic bulk metafield edit function (and even to patch to remove the URL work around / hack that the community discovered). Yes I’m up to my eyeballs in apps and working to reduce the number. Instead of using metafields, I’m just going to use mass templates to do what I need.
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