How to Export and Import Product Metafields in Shopify

Learn how to enhance your Shopify reports using metafields for orders, products, and customers. Unlock a new level of insights and data analysis with Mipler’s reporting tool. Discover how to export Shopify orders metafields to transport data easily.

One commonly used feature of Shopify is its ability to add custom information to various store entities using a special feature called metafields. Metafields allow store owners to put additional data specific to the store into products, product variants, orders, and customers. With our app, you may also export Shopify products with metafields. With this feature, you can import metafields in Shopify to other applications or documents for further processing.

Additionally, third-party apps can import data to metafields that are specific to the app.

Furthermore, Shopify provides an amazing API to manage metafields. With API, you can manage fields for each entity and set values of fields.

Discover Shopify data with well-tailored reports.

For example:

Order metafields can contain information such as expected Delivery Date and Time, Delivery method, Referral Identifier, etc.
Products and product variants can also have metafields that contain information like Supplier Code, Internal Product Group, Model Year, etc.
Customers can also have metafields that contain data about Birthday, Related Affiliate Identifier, Code of Customer Segment, etc.

Metafields also widely increase opportunities for creating reports that are specific to e-commerce or business needs.

There are three main types of Shopify reports that can be built using metafields:

Operational reports.
Metafields can be used to view orders pending delivery with a delivery time stored in the metafields and so on.
Sales reports.
All kinds of sales reports are grouped or filtered by metafield. Metafields add a finished or completed look to reports. Operating information is much easier if all values are on one sheet.
Product and inventory reports.
A large variety of reports extends using metafields. Like product performance by the supplier or products to re-stock with supplier and supplier code.
Customers reports.
To export customer lists for email campaigns filtered by metafields or calculate affiliate commission, where the affiliate code is the customer's metafield.

"This app is an excellent tool! I use it to give need-to-know information directly to team members that need it."

- Trask Performance

Join us and gain access to interactive reports for Shopify.

Using metafields to create Shopify reports, export, and import data

Shopify metafields allow you to import useful information to your reports or create new reports with added fields.

Export orders/products/customers with metafields

One of the lesser-known but nonetheless important use cases of Mipler Reports is its ability to generate reports just for export. This means you can export data from your Shopify store that includes specific metafields assigned to your orders, products, or customers. Our app allows you to choose from hundreds of different fields to export, including those related to metafields.

The app provides flexibility to export just the specific metafields you need or export a complete array of metafields for each entity. This feature enables you to export data for further processing with other apps.

You can import data to other places using the Shopify export product metafields feature. After you export metafields, load them into the app you need. The process of import may vary. Our app also allows you to export metafields to Google Sheets. You can just export needed information or export it to use in reports.

Product performance report with supplier information

A product performance report with supplier information shows the performance of each product (or product variants) in terms of sales, along with information about the suppliers (metafield).

This type of report can be used to identify the best or worst-performing products in relation to the supplier.

The report can also be extended with additional columns, like the cost of goods sold (COGS), gross profit or margin, last purchase date, or percent from total sales. The report can help you optimize pricing policy and supplier relationships.

Live example of Shopify Product Performance Report

shopify supplier meta fields — Report with Supplier and Supplier Code Metafield Column

In that report, we add 2 additional metafields:

Supplier - metafield of Product
Supplier Code - metafield of Product Variants

Also, a variation of built-in Inventory On Hand reports with supplier information:

Inventory On Hand

Sales report with a breakdown by the supplier

A sales report with a breakdown by the supplier shows the total sales for each supplier, total cost, and profit/margin per supplier. This type of report can be useful for identifying which suppliers are the most profitable to a store and for identifying changes in sales for each supplier over time.

Additionally, this report can be used to optimize the supplier chain: identify suppliers, identify best-selling/worst-selling products by supplier, and make decisions.

Breakdown by the supplier

shopify report by supplier — Breakdown report by suppliers

Build Shopify report by metafields

Since metafields are unique for each store, you just need to add a new column to your reports with the required ACE expression.

As Mipler is a bi-reporting software, it provides multiple implementation options.

In most cases, the ACE expression syntax for metafields is:

json_path(products.meta_fields, "custom.supplier_code")
json_path(orders.meta_fields, "custom.delivery_date")

Additionally, you can apply any data transformation expression to the field value.

For example, convert a string to date to use a calendar filter by delivery date:

date_value(json_path(orders.metafields, "custom.delivery_date"))

Omit unwanted characters to transform values to the identical representation form:

substitute(lower(json_path(products.meta_fields, "general.sku")), "-", "")

You can find more details on how to use json_path in the manual. Once the new column is added, it can be used across all built-in reports or with new reports.

shopify column by metafield — Creating a new column by metafield

Alternatives

An alternative to using metafields for assigning information to entities in Shopify, such as orders, customers, products, and variants, is to use tags. Shopify provides the ability to assign tags to these entities, making it a universal solution for categorizing information.

In some cases, tags may be preferred over metafields for assigning information.

For example, if the number of possible tag values is limited (such as the supplier name having only a few dozen variations but the supplier code/SKU not being suitable for tags)

Additionally, if you need to import or export information using built-in Shopify features, tags may be a better option, as they can be easily exported and imported. However, the Shopify import product metafields feature allows you to import and export data to a wider variety of third-party apps.

Another scenario where tags may be preferred is when the number of different types of information is small. Then, you may not even need Shopify import metafields or tags features.

Regarding creating reports, there is no significant difference in using metafields or tags as the value. Both can be used to build reports, and you can import and export them. The choice depends on the specific requirements and use cases.