There’s a small example tucked into BigCommerce’s developer documentation. A coffee roaster might use a metafield on its variants to store the roasted on date. Simple enough. But think about where that date would go in a normal product form. There isn’t really a spot for it, so it lands in the description, or a custom field, or a spreadsheet somebody updates when they remember.
That’s how it goes for most stores. Nothing breaks all at once. The tools that were fine at fifty products start needing little workarounds at five hundred, and then those workarounds need their own workarounds. This article looks at how leading ecommerce companies approach outgrowing basic ecommerce apps, and the signs that usually show up long before anyone says it out loud.
The Description Box Has Become a Junk Drawer
When there’s nowhere else to put something, it goes in the description. Care instructions. Dimensions. Compatibility notes, materials, warranty terms. It all piles into one block of text, and no two products seem to be laid out the same way.
Custom fields help a little, but not as much as you’d hope. On BigCommerce, each product can have up to 200 custom fields, and both the name and the value cap out at 250 characters. They’re plain text, too, so there’s nothing stopping one person from typing “12 in” and the next from typing “30cm.”
Shoppers pick up on this. Baymard Institute’s testing found that people often abandon a product when key information is missing from the description, and some decide that the descriptions they’ve already seen say something about the product information across the whole site. So a couple of thin pages can drag down how people see everything else you sell.
Inconsistent Specs Are a Data Problem Before They’re a Design Problem
You usually find this one on the storefront. The comparison table looks off. A filter shows weird results. Somebody says, “Let’s get the designer to clean this up.”
The designer can’t really fix it, though, because the mess started when the data went in. Baymard found that inconsistent product data and mixed units of measure leave shoppers doing the math themselves, which often means guessing or going somewhere else to research. When they tested KitchenAid’s site, inconsistent specs tripped up 25% of the users.
Here’s the honest truth about data entry: if you let people type whatever they want, they will. One person writes “3/4/26.” Another writes “March 4.” A dropdown, a number field, or a date picker quietly takes that choice away, and nobody has to memorize a style guide.
Every Small Change Turns Into a Developer Ticket
On BigCommerce, metafields solve a lot of this. They’re custom key-value pairs that developers can attach to store data, and they work on customers, carts, channels, brands, categories, products, variants, locations, and orders. There’s plenty of space, too. The platform allows up to 250 metafields per product, variant, category, brand, or channel.
Getting to them is the hard part. If every change has to go through a developer, a two-minute fix can sit for days. Nobody should need a ticket to add a new material type or fix a typo. And the bigger your catalog gets, the longer that line grows.
If the people who know your products best can’t edit your product data, that’s a pretty good sign you’ve outgrown your setup.
Adding Another App Rarely Solves an App Problem
It’s tempting to just grab another app. One for badges. One for tabs. A size chart widget for the clothing pages. Any one of them might be fine. Ten of them is a different story. HTTP Archive’s 2024 Web Almanac found that 92% of pages load at least one third party, and the authors point out that third parties come with privacy, security, and performance tradeoffs. Not every app adds scripts to your storefront, but a lot of them do. Each one is also another login, another monthly bill, and one more thing that might break after a theme update.
Most of the time, you’ll get more out of replacing a handful of small tools with one that actually organizes your data than you will from adding app number eleven.
Structure Beats Another Workaround
Picture trying to update a product’s material across your catalog. On some products it’s in the description. On others it’s in a custom field. A few don’t list it at all. Before you can change anything, you have to go hunting. Do that across a few hundred products and you’ve lost an afternoon.
For growing BigCommerce stores looking to solve this, dedicated solutions like Advanced Metafields gives BigCommerce stores a cleaner way to handle it. You set up fields for things like materials, roast dates, or warranty terms, decide what kind of value each one takes, and use them across products, variants, categories, brands, and orders. There’s CSV import and export for big batches, so you’re not clicking through records one at a time. And your merchandising team can make those updates themselves.
You’ll want to sit down first and figure out which details matter, what each field should accept, and where it should show up on your site. That last part needs a little setup: BigCommerce’s documentation says a metafield needs storefront access permission before shoppers can see it, and metafields are shown on the storefront through the GraphQL Storefront API. Skip the planning and you’ll end up with clutter. Neater clutter, sure, but still clutter.
What To Look For Before You Upgrade
Before you buy anything, grab ten products from different categories and look at how their info is actually stored. You’ll probably spot missing details, the same attribute written three different ways, or information split between the description and custom fields. That’s your real to-do list.
When comparing tools, look for:
- Locked-down fields that prevent manual data entry errors.
- Reusable attributes across products, variants, and the rest of the store.
- Efficient bulk editing that doesn’t require exporting your entire catalog.
- Accessible permissions so your merchandising team can run updates without developer bottlenecks.
Then, when you’re comparing tools, think about the work your team does every week. You want fields you can lock down, fields you can reuse across products, variants, and the rest of the store, and bulk editing that doesn’t mean exporting your entire catalog. Last, think about who’ll actually be using it. If only your developer can run it, you’ve just moved the bottleneck.
Outgrowing basic apps doesn’t usually look dramatic. It looks like stuffed descriptions, messy specs, and small edits waiting in someone’s queue, and the way out is giving your product data a real structure that your team can manage on its own.
For more insight on structuring product data in BigCommerce, visit our Advanced Metafields page.
