When shipping internationally, you will need to include extra information about the products in an order to be used at customs checks. This information is called commodity information, more on how this is used within Shiptheory can be found on this guide here.
To add commodity information to your orders within Shopify, you will need to use Metafields. These are custom extra pieces of information about a product within the backend of your store. There are many Metafield apps available for Shopify, this guide will demonstrate how you can setup using the free app, Metafeild Guru
How do I setup Metafield Guru to be used with Shiptheory?
To add Metafield Guru to your Shopify store, you will need to find and install it from the Shopify App Store.
Once installed, when viewing a product in Shopify, under More actions you will have the option to open Metafield Guru.
This new page will provide a list of all your products within Shopify, select one to add a metafield to it. On this new page, you will be given the option to Create Metafield.
NOTE: You will want to make sure every product has metafields assigned to it. If one product has multiple variants, each of the variants will need to also have metafields assigned to them.
You will want to fill out the Key, Namespace, and the field below them. The image below shows an example of how a metafield could be filled out. For more information about what each of these are, and how they should be completed, please see our guide on commodity data from Shopify.
IMPORTANT: Make sure you have added metafields to the variants themselves, as we will attempt to pull this information from a variant level rather than a general product level. If you haven't created any variants, there will still be one on the variants page called "Default title" or something along those lines.
Shiptheory requires the metafield information to be populated in the variant as that's where we'll pull that information from. If the metafields are only populated on the base product, Shiptheory won't pull this information in, see the GIF below that shows this:
If you have an order that isn't pulling through the metafield data, double check that the variant has been set up with these fields. Once set up, you should be able to retry an order to have the updated information pulled through.
Once a metafield has been created for each of the 3 commodity data categories, Commodity Description, Composition, and Country of Manufacture. You will then need to link them to Shiptheory from within your Shopify Advanced settings, as shown below.
Optionally, you can also specify a metafield for the Commodity HS Tariff Code which will override the default value set in Shopify. The default field in Shopify limits the field to 6 characters, so if you need to specify more than 6 characters for the Tariff Code, then you should use this setting.
Now each time an order comes through to Shiptheory, it should come through with all the commodity information.
Have any questions about setting this up? One of our Support Team will be able to give you a hand!
