Support product metafields at the variant level

Metafields in Shopify allows you to store additional information for product and its variants, collections, orders, blogs, pages, and your shop that cannot be managed within the native fields provided by Shopify. If you want to maintain additional description fields for your catalogs such as the detailed description of the featured description, you can do this in NetSuite by creating custom fields. But in Shopify, you can do this by leveraging the metafields functionality. A metafield in Shopify consists of a namespace, a key, a value, and a description (optional). For more information about metafields and their different parts, refer to Metafields.

Notes: 

• You “cannot” delete metafields using our flow.
• Shopify does not support syncing data from a NetSuite field that has an empty value.

Approaches to configure metafields

To configure the metafields, you can map the existing NetSuite standard fields or create custom fields to Shopify metafields. You can configure metafields using any of the below approaches:

• Configure using “Specify your Shopify variant metafield components” setting: (recommended approach): This setting in the Product - Advanced Settings allows you to configure and update metafields at the variant level using the Namespace, Key, Value (Enter NetSuite Field ID), and Description (Optional: Enter NetSuite Field ID) fields. For more information, refer to configure metafields using the “Specify your Shopify variant metafield components” setting.
• Configure using the NetSuite saved search: This approach is recommended only if a meta fields value cannot be derived directly from a single field. For more information, refer to configure metafields using the NetSuite saved search.

Additional information about metafields

The supported value types for metafields are string, integer, and json_string. The Integration App automatically sets the value type based on the value provided in the NetSuite item field. The Integration App allows you to create or update up to 250 metafields. 

If you have a combination of metafields such as metafields that can fetch data directly from a single NetSuite field and metafields that cannot be written directly from a single field, in this scenario, you can use both the above-mentioned options to configure metafields. 

• Note: In this scenario, do not repeat the same Namespace and Key combination in the “Specify your Shopify variant metafield components” setting and in the NetSuite saved search.

When you run the “NetSuite Matrix Item to Shopify Product” flow, the field mappings variants[*].metafields (Export Field - NetSuite) and product.variants[*].metafields (Import Field) generates or updates the metafields at the variant level in Shopify. These field mappings are independent of the field mappings (meta[*].Technical Specifications (Meta) - product.metafields[*].namespace:key) that are used to create metafields at the parent level.