We Unlocked Shopify with Airfields — and then we bought it.

Shopify metafields are the most powerful component in the entire Shopify dev environment and framework. They’re general, accessible anywhere, and the best way to extend standard Shopify functionality. In fact, one of Shopify’s first acquihires was a Google Chrome extensions, ShopifyFD, built by now head of Shopify partnerships for the Australia, Jason Bowman. The one MAJOR drawback however is that while metafields are simple and powerful for developers, they are cumbersome and challenging to use for merchants.

Why?

Because the default bulk editor view for managing metafields is terrible.

There had to be a better way.

We had heard for years that while our merchants loved metafields the lack of usability became real obstacles as they scaled and their teams became more diverse and less intimately acquainted with Shopify.

We weren’t going to stop using metafields so we set out to find a better solution.

During this research, I landed on the blog of an incredible offshore agency: Bornfight. If you don’t know them, like I didn’t at the time, Bornfight is known for digital design & development spanning multiple industries. Their portfolio is outstanding. In this post, they were writing about a recent custom Shopify build and how important metafields are in their custom theme development process.

However, what stuck out was how they called out a little known, relatively new Shopify metafields manager called Airfields. We had a few criteria for what a metafields manager needed to have for us to recommend it to merchants: (1) Native UI using Shopify Polaris — it had to live within and feel like a natural part of the Shopify CMS (2) Files and other assets had to be stored locally, no 3rd party hosting. We don’t want to store critical customer files outside of Shopify and thereby increase the technical complexity and points of failure for our merchants’ stores.

Airfields checked all these boxes (and a few more) and we were particularly impressed with the way it solves the file storage issue — it creates a Airfields Theme in your Shopify account and uses that as a CDN for files and assets. This keeps everything right in Shopify.

When we found this, we had one particularly client who was populating metafields every day. She was getting frustrated (and rightfully so). We installed Airfields, showed her how to use it, 3 hours later, she called us back and said

“I’m literally crying right now, Airfields is so much better”

We were sold.

So we decided to buy.

We reached out to the makers of Airfields, a dev agency based in Warsaw with offices in NYC and Paris. Besides our love for Airfields the synergy with Airnauts is uncanny, their approach, the team, Warsaw — our CTO is based there and we go 2 times a year at least.

Fast forward 3 months + a many meetings in NYC and Warsaw and we inked a deal to become 50/50 partners on Airfields.

Metafields are and will continue to be one of the most powerful tools for Shopify developers. Since diving in with Airfields, we’ve installed it on many stores and used it to build incredible functionality like:

• Product Variant Image Galleries that allow merchants to select photos for specific variants so that, when customers choose a specific variant, they only see photos relevant to those products.
• 1:1 Product Relations that power in-cart upsells. There are so many in-cart upsell apps. They all suck, cost too much money, hijack your cart, aren’t compatible with AJAX slide-out carts, and negatively affect site performance. Using Airfields and native metafields, merchants can choose 1,2, or 3 child products to associate with any given parent product, and a widget can be shown in any cart powering increases in average order value (AOV) and minimal site performance compromises.

- Badge and label functionality that lets merchants enable, disable, customize and style such components for any product or variant anywhere.

We also noticed unintended consequences as an end result.

Most notably, where merchants would have had to rely on an ever growing list of unstructured tags or product template variations, which inevitably led to user errors (and more client project management), Airfields has increased client happiness by allowing us to build a better final product for our merchants.

I’ll end with a dev metaphor, our goal is for what Advanced Custom Fields is to Wordpress, Airfields is to Shopify by offering:

• Extreme usability
• Impeccable UI
• Unlimited use cases

Obviously, I’m biased. My company owns the app. Go download it here: Airfields.io