A one-size-fits-all ecommerce platform wouldn’t work for most merchants, as every store has its own unique set of product details and customer needs.
The BigCommerce Custom fields feature allows merchants to add custom data to their products–ensuring that shoppers get all the information they need to confidently make a purchase.
This powerful feature is something that all merchants on the BigCommerce platform should know about.
In this guide, we’ll break down everything brands need to know about Custom Fields–from potential use cases to exact instructions for creating your own.
When adding a product to your BigCommerce store’s catalog, you’ll be presented with a variety of pre-made fields, dropdown menus, checkboxes, and file upload areas that allow you to input information about the product.
The only required fields for all products are product name and default price. For physical products, you must also add the product weight.
There are also optional pre-made fields for several other types of data, including:
Some of these default product information options will be displayed on the live version of your site, while others are only used for search/filtering or logistical purposes.
In addition to these default options, BigCommerce also allows you to make your own custom fields that will appear on the live product page. Custom fields are displayed as a name-value pairing that’s separate from the product description. Exactly where these fields are located on the page will depend on which BigCommerce theme you’re using.
When working with custom fields, be sure to account for the following limitations:
To give you some inspiration on how you can use this feature to benefit your specific store, the following table breaks down a few of the most common product information fields that aren’t default options in BigCommerce:
| Custom Field | Type of Data |
| Material | Describe what material a product is made out of, such as cotton, linen, nylon, or wool. |
| Fit | Another useful field for online clothing stores, you can use this space to tell customers if the fit of an item is slim, relaxed, or something in between. |
| Capacity | From water bottles to coffee pots to storage bags, there are many different types of products where the amount of capacity is an important detail. |
| Compatibility | Indicate which other items a product is compatible with — for example, a charger cord may only work for certain phone models. |
Adding these fields can provide numerous benefits, such as highlighting the most attractive features of your products, setting yourself apart from the competition, and reducing the number of customer support inquiries that you need to address.
There are two ways to add custom fields to your products in BigCommerce — you can do so by editing an individual product’s settings through the BigCommerce control panel, or you can upload a CSV file in order to add custom fields to multiple products at once.
To add a custom field through the product settings page, simply follow these steps:
Once you save your changes to the product settings page, the custom field will appear on the live version of your site.
If you would like to add custom fields to multiple products, you can save time by using a spreadsheet. Before you can import updated product information, you’ll first need to export a CSV of your current product information — that way, everything will be formatted correctly when you import the data back into your store:
In this spreadsheet template, you’ll find that the very last column is labeled “Product Custom Fields” — as you might have guessed, this is where you’ll add your custom fields. Use the format name=value for each custom field (e.g. Number of Pages=<b>200</b>). And if you’d like to use multiple custom fields for the same product, separate each one with a semicolon (e.g. Number of Pages=<b>200</b>;Material=<b>Recycled paper</b>).
Once you’ve finished adding your custom fields:
While Shogun does not currently support importing custom fields that you created within BigCommerce, it’s worth noting that you can still use Shogun to add new types of data to your BigCommerce store.
Shogun’s CMS Collections tool enables you to create your own custom data models using the following properties:
For example, if you wanted to build a data model for employee profiles, you could use the plain text property to add fields for their name and role and one of the image properties for their headshots.
Once a CMS Collection has been created, you can then reference it in Custom Elements, which is the Shogun tool that allows you to add any features you’ve developed yourself to Shogun’s visual editor (Custom Elements can be built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code).
The visual editor also offers a wide selection of pre-made elements, allowing you to add and customize common ecommerce features such as text, images, video, interactive maps, and countdown clocks with just a couple clicks. So, the convenience of the visual editor will allow you to quickly create content for your BigCommerce store, while CMS Collections and Custom Elements give you the freedom to custom-code parts of your site whenever it may be necessary.
CMS Collections are particularly useful for content that is featured on multiple pages — whenever you make an update to a CMS Collection, this change will automatically be reflected on every page where it is included.
Let’s say that many of your BigCommerce blog posts are attributed to one of your employees, and now you want to update the role that’s listed on their author bio. If you used a CMS Collection to create this part of your site, you would only need to make this update once. Otherwise, it might have been necessary to go through the tedious process of manually updating every single one of the author’s posts.
Overall, Shogun offers a complete solution for building your BigCommerce homepage, product pages, landing pages, and everything in between.
