I am usually very resourceful but I am at a loss in this situation. Not sure what I am looking for. First time posting ever…
My website sells semi-custom dog clothing and I would like to know how to add a section where my customers can store/update their dog’s measurements/information directly in their accounts.
I would like it to function similarly to how the addresses are stored. Customer might have 1,2 or more dogs.
I would also like for customers to use this information in the ordering process. (item intended for “Fido”)
My website is www.zepooch.com to give a sense of what I do. In the product page, you will see a form asking for their dog’s information. Currently, repeating customers need to re-enter this information every time they order which can be quite bothersome.
Hope my explanation is understandable
Anyone have a solution for me? Oh, and I would prefer to do this programmatically without using an app.
From my perspective, the best way to handle your use-case is to save the dog information into Shopify as a metafield under the Customer resource. With this approach, the custom data would be stored on the customer records in Shopify, and this would allow you to use Liquid to easily display the extra customer-specific data on the storefront. To get the dog information to be included as part of the order, you can use line-item properties to allow the customer to include extra details for each product they are purchasing. With the use of metafields you can show a list of the customer’s dogs attached to their account, and you can save the value for the selected dog into the order as a line-item property. The idea here is to allow the customer to save the dog information to their account, and allow the customer to select which specific dog each product is intended for – all without the customer having to type in the dogs’ information every time they want to add a product to their cart.
You’ll need to use an app of some sort to take the form submission data from the storefront and create/update the customer record in Shopify’s backend. If you’re not interested in developing a custom app using the Shopify API, then I’d suggest looking at our Customer Fields app. Customer Fields automatically saves all custom data into Shopify’s metafields, and it has built-in features that allow you to collect all sorts of custom data from customers, including multiple sets of related data (e.g. the name, age, and breed for each of their dogs). With Customer Fields you’d still need to add some custom code to the theme to display the metafields data and save the desired data into the order as a line-item property, but that is much less work compared to trying to build a completely custom solution from the ground up.
Hopefully this helps! Please let us know if you have any questions
I know this thread is quite old, but I stumbled upon it while researching the “buyer vs. consumer” gap in pet retail (where the human buys, but the pet consumes).
Your post perfectly describes the technical pain of bridging that gap!
Curious — did you ever find a programmatic solution to store those measurements so customers don’t have to re-enter them every time?
I’m exploring this exact problem right now and would love to know what eventually worked for you (or if you still handle it manually).
Not selling anything, just trying to understand how custom shops solve this.
