Every store with more than a handful of products ends up with rules about its product data. "Riding style" is one style, not a list. "Flex" uses the factory rating from the spec sheet. "Care" is two short lines, no marketing copy. The size chart is required before launch.
Those rules usually live in three places at once: someone's head, a Slack thread from last spring, and a spreadsheet that was right when it was made. The merch team knows them, the content team half knows them, and the supplier who actually sends the data has never seen them.
Write it once, next to the field
A field guide is a short explanation for each metafield: what it's for, what to write, an example, whether it's required, where it shows on the store and who to ask. You write it in Cartsella Studio, and your team sees it right next to the field while they fill it in. The example is one click away from becoming the value.
That alone fixes most of the guessing. But not everyone who needs the rules works in your Shopify admin.
Now: the whole guide as a PDF
Metafields › Guide › Download PDF turns the guide into a document you can send to anyone:
- A cover with the store, how many fields there are, how many have help and how many are required.
- A contents page, one line per resource.
- Every field with its name, type and key, and its help: what to write, the example, where it shows and who to ask.
The PDF follows what you filtered on the page. Send a supplier only the product fields, or only the required ones, without editing anything.
Who it's for
- Suppliers get the exact format you need before they send a spec sheet, not after.
- New hires read one document on day one instead of learning the rules by breaking them.
- Content and SEO write to the same standard on every product.
- Agencies hand a client a documented store at the end of a project.
Prefer a link? A read-only share link shows the same guide to people without a Shopify login. You choose which resources it shows, set it to expire, switch it off at any time, and see how often it's opened. Links and PDFs never show your products, prices or customers: only the fields and their help.
The fill-in report, also as a PDF
Writing the rules is half the job. The other half is knowing where they aren't followed yet. The fill-in report counts, for every field, how many products, collections and pages have it filled in, with the required fields first and a bar for each, so the gaps stand out.
It has its own Download PDF now, for the weekly product meeting, and still exports as a CSV. When you're ready to fix things, "Fill them in" opens each product that still misses a required field, one after another. A weekly digest can send the team what's still empty, and how it changed.
Where to start
- Mark the fields every product must have as "Required for us".
- Write help for the five fields people get wrong most often. You don't need all of them on day one.
- Download the PDF and send it to your main supplier and your newest team member.
- Run the fill-in report and work through the required gaps once a week.
Field guides, PDFs, share links, the fill-in report and the weekly digest are included in Pro and Agency, and in the 14-day free trial.
Give every team the same answers.
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