Send a Shopify custom field to your supplier

Shopify sends the extra details of a product in the cart, such as an engraving text, a chosen material or an artwork link, as line item properties. Dropday receives them with the order.

Find the field in an order

1. Open the order.

2. Scroll to Products and expand the product line.

3. Under Product details, look for the Custom heading, below the standard fields such as Product title, SKU and Quantity. It lists all extra fields of that product, including the line item properties.

The Custom heading only appears if the line has custom fields.

The order itself has a Custom section in the Order overview block too, but only if the order has custom fields at order level. Shopify orders normally have none, because Shopify sends its extra details per product.

Which name to use

A field usually appears twice: once under its original name as entered in Shopify (for example Ground Material) and once under a simplified name in lowercase with underscores (for example ground_material). A name that is already simple appears once.

Use the simplified name with custom. in front of it, for example custom.ground_material.

Add the field to your supplier email

Dropday turns every line item property name into a simple key: all letters lowercase, spaces and dashes become an underscore, and brackets and other punctuation are removed. Ground Material becomes ground_material, Gift Message becomes gift_message and Size (cm) becomes size_cm. Write the key exactly like that: Ground_Material does not work.

To find the exact key, open a recent order that contains the product, open the product line and read the extra fields under Custom. The lowercase name with underscores, with custom. in front, is the key.

If the order shows no Custom section, the information was not added to the product in Shopify when the order was placed.

In the supplier email, add the key as an extra column to the product table, for example:

{order_lines:quantity|name|reference|custom.ground_material}

Replace custom.ground_material with your own key. The email then shows that field as an extra column for each product.

Send orders by email explains the email settings.

Use the field on a packing slip or in a rule or file

• Packing slip: add a line under Order line fields with the key, a colon and the title of the column, for example custom.ground_material: Ground material. Packing slips explains the settings.

• Rules: use the key as the field to check, for example custom.ground_material.

• FTP and API Call: include the field in the content of the file or message yourself. Order files and field mapping and Send orders to a supplier's API explain how.

Send a product metafield value to your supplier

To get the value of a product metafield to your supplier, copy it onto the cart line as a line item property. This is a change in your Shopify theme, outside Dropday.

1. In the product form of your theme, add a hidden input that carries the value, for example properties[_supplier_code].

2. Place an order that contains the product, then open the product line in Dropday. The property arrives as custom._supplier_code on the order line.

3. Add that key to your supplier email, packing slip or file as described above.

A property name that starts with an underscore is hidden from the customer at checkout, but it is still included in the order.

The Shopify app itself sends no product or variant metafields, only line item properties.

You can also copy a value into a product tag, for example supplier-code:ABC123, by hand or with Shopify Flow. The Shopify app sends tags as labels, which suits simple values but gets messy for structured data.