Why are some product meta fields blank in bulk editor?

Technical Q&A

Topic summary

Issue: Product metafields (custom fields) appear blank in Shopify’s bulk editor for roughly half the products, despite being populated in Admin. Affected products also don’t appear as dynamic sources in product templates across themes (Warehouse, Dawn).

Context: Reporter suspects the problem relates to items created before the Online Store 2.0 upgrade. Attempting to edit these blank entries in bulk editor fails with a “field has to be unique” error.

Actions/Outcome: Shopify support fixed the metafields not showing on many product pages (dynamic sources now work for those). However, metafields still do not appear in the bulk editor for the affected products.

Workaround: Clearing a metafield, saving, then re-entering and saving the value restores functionality for a product. This is effective but time-consuming at scale.

Status: Partially resolved. Product page display issues were fixed; bulk editor visibility remains an open issue.

Notes: Brief comment suggests the cause is tied to 2.0, but no detailed explanation was provided.

Summarized with AI on December 17. AI used: gpt-5.
1

Hello Community.

I have come across an interesting situation with our Meta Fields. I noticed in bulk editor, my product meta fields show blank for about half of our products even though the meta fields are filled in for those products in Shopify admin. My suspicion is that these are products created before the Shopify 2.0 upgrade because it seems they are all older products.

If I try to update the incorrectly blank fields in bulk editor, I get an error that the field has to be unique and it will not save the changes.

I also noticed that these affected products do not show the meta fields when I use them as a dynamic source on my product pages.

I checked with my theme (Warehouse) and also one of the free Shopify themes (Dawn) and the same issue happens with the meta fields not showing on these particular product pages.

Is there something I can do to “sync” up the meta fields for the older products so that they show in bulk editor and on the product pages?

2

Shopify ended up fixing the metafields not showing on many of our product pages. The metafields still do not show in the bulk editor for these products, but that is negligible.

I found that clearing the metafield, saving it, and then putting it back and saving again will reset it to work again. Of course, that could be quite time consuming if you have hundreds of affected products like in our case.

3

Due to 2.0