Shopify metaobjects: What you need to know

Over the past year, Shopify has continued to deliver more features that enhance the online shopping experience. One of the most noteworthy features is metaobjects, which give merchants the power to define and manage custom data models (such as product specifications, size charts, etc.) on their storefronts. 

As metaobjects are a relatively new phenomenon, you probably have a lot of questions, such as: 

• What are the best use cases for metaobjects?

• What's the difference between metaobjects and metafields?

• How do you use metaobjects to create and manage content?

This article will answer those questions by explaining the fundamentals of metaobjects, how merchants and devs can leverage them to enhance storefronts, and how a visual editor can help you unlock their full potential.

Let's dive in.

What are metaobjects?

Simply put, metaobjects allow you to add and store structured data inside a Shopify storefront, where they act as reusable blocks of custom content that can be used anywhere on your site. 

For example, let's say an art gallery wanted to post bios of the artists they work with and dynamically link to the artwork they have for sale. By creating a metaobject for “artists” (a custom data model), you or your devs can add fields for bios, headshots, links, and more. Once you’ve defined your metaobjects, you can add them to product pages, an artist directory, special events pages, etc. Better yet, you only have to update the metaobject once for changes to go live everywhere.

Some of the best use cases for metaobjects include:

• Product descriptions

• Features and specifications

• Clothing size charts 

• Ingredients lists

Why? Because these are content blocks that don’t need to be updated frequently, and need to be consistent throughout the site. 

While metaobjects are best used for evergreen content that doesn’t change often, they can be used to update your homepage, implement marketing assets, and even create landing pages (but we’ll get more into that later).

How are metaobjects different from metafields?

The primary difference between metaobjects and metafields is metaobjects are used to define new data models, whereas metafields are used to enhance existing data models. 

For example, let’s say you’re an online grocer that wants to store information on your products, such as ingredients, nutrition facts, etc. metafields would be able to facilitate that change. 

However, if you wanted to include a section on a PDP detailing the different farms your products are sourced from, you would use metaobjects to define a new “farms” object with details/fields that show information like name, location, imagery, etc.

Once completed, the “farms” metaobject can be assigned to any product, where it will be displayed every time a shopper views the product’s page.  

In short, metaobjects empower merchants to create new objects from scratch, whereas metafields help merchants add and customize existing fields on their storefronts. Now that we’ve cleared the air on that differentiation, let’s move on to how metaobjects can help merchants and developers unlock the full value of Shopify.

The benefits of metaobjects

For developers

At first glance, metaobjects might not seem like the flashiest innovation coming from Shopify. However, they have benefits, including:

1. Storing structured data within Shopify—so everything is one place

2. Streamlined content management–reducing dev lift for site changes 

3. More flexible builds within Shopify

For merchants

Metaobjects make it easier to store your store data all in one place. Merchants will benefit from:

1. A mini CMS (content management system)  for static content that can help delivers content-rich experiences

2. Enhanced content delivery within Shopify

3. Maximizes ROI from Shopify

For everyone

While the use cases for metaobjects are vast, they don’t live within a theme, and lack any visual layer to make it easy to find them quickly and add them to a page—especially without developer intervention.

As an early mover in recognizing areas of opportunity that Shopify can’t yet meet, Pack collaborated with the Shopify team to fill this gap and unlock the true potential of metaobjects.

How Pack unlocks the potential of metaobjects

Pack makes it easy to add metaobjects to any page— regardless of your technical background. Let’s see what that looks like in practice:

See your metaobjects, and drag and drop them onto a page

Typically, when a merchant wants to add new content to their site outside Shopify’s native capabilities, they will ask a developer to create a metaobject. A developer will then use the metaobject’s API to source definitions into the front end and build those components.

The gap in this process is once a metaobject has been created, there’s no visual way to preview it, store it, or add it to a page—there’s no customizer experience for metaobjects. That means a developer needs to be involved every time you want to use a metaobject. Pack removes this friction by allowing developers to bring metaobjects into Pack’s customizer, making it easy to preview them and add them to any page.

Quick back-end builds with an intuitive front-end

Pack also removes the need for devs to go into the metaobjects API to source definitions. If they know the definition and reference type, they can pull the metaobject into Pack by simply referencing a line of code in the code base. This streamlined process helps developers pull metaobjects into their store’s front end in mere minutes. 

Once metaobjects have been brought into Pack via Shopify, marketers can easily place and customize metaobjects via a drag-and-drop interface–unlocking a plethora of custom content possibilities. While metaobject data is still stored and edited on Shopify , Pack provides a direct link to each metaobject where alterations can be made in seconds, and changes are automatically reflected in Pack.

How Nomad Goods built an entire site with metaobjects managed via Pack

As a premier consumer electronics and lifestyle brand, Nomad Goods was looking for new ways to deliver content-rich experiences within Shopify’s native parameters. 

To enhance the shopping experience without sacrificing site speed, the Nomad team partnered with Form Factory to build out a series of metaobjects, and then pull them into Pack to manage them—with everything from homepage elements to landing pages and PDPs.

With their new Hydrogen-powered site, the Nomad Goods’ marketing team uses metaobjects to seamlessly add custom content to landing pages, while developers can still access and use metaobject data as needed.

Maximizing the value of Shopify

Shopify’s addition of metaobjects empowers merchants to deliver content-rich experiences tailored to their shoppers’ specific needs, while Hydrogen provides the infrastructure to keep these experiences blazing fast and flexible.

Metaobjects are only the beginning. We’re finding new ways to bring together the flexibility and streamlined architecture of a Hydrogen storefront, with the ease-of-use of a visual, drag-and-drop editor. Whether you’re looking to spin up a Hydrogen storefront that’s easy to manage, or just manage your metaobjects, our dev documentation is a great place to start. 

Plus, you can always reach out to us at contact@packdigital.com with specific questions. Our commitment is to give you unbiased, technically sound advice!