Metafields - The best feature of Shopify you've never heard of

What is a metafield you ask? It's a feature that gives you the ability to natively add metadata to things like products, orders, customers, etc.

I had never heard of this feature until I joined the Custom Data engineering team at Shopify but was bewildered at how simple but powerful of a tool we had given to anyone with a Shopify subscription as the opportunities are endless. 

As a simple example, you want to add a birthday for all your customers and send them an email with a discount code to say happy birthday without paying for a 3rd party app in the Shopify App store? Very possible with Metafields.

I was surprised it wasn't a bigger deal and causing more noise in the ecosystem but that because the average person can't understand what it is. The craziest part is Metafields have a big brother, Metaobjects and they're just as powerful. Let me explain in the next post.