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Reading path

Publishing by platform

You save a value in your store's admin and want it to show up on the product page. This path explains how it gets from one to the other on Shopify and on BigCommerce, with a branch for each platform. By the end you will know what a crawler receives in the first response, where each platform keeps a value its standard model has no field for, and what it takes for the theme or the app to write it on the page, and why a value can get lost when another system writes the same field. With that you can ask whoever works on your store to show you the data on the public page, not only in the admin.

First what is the same on any platform, then one branch per platform, and last what applies to both again. A value saved in the admin only reaches the page if the theme, an app or the frontend writes it there, and that works differently on Shopify and on BigCommerce. That is why the path has four stretches and you read three: the first, the last and the branch for your platform.

  1. Steps 1 to 3 · How a page reaches whoever reads it (both platforms). With SSR, the content travels in the first HTML response. With JavaScript rendering, the browser assembles it afterward, and not every bot waits for that. Headless commerce is the other way to build a store, with the frontend separated from the backend.
  2. Steps 4 to 8 · Shopify branch. Liquid is the templating language of themes. Metafields store data the standard model has no field for, and the metaobject groups them into a reusable record. The app embed is how an app adds code without touching the theme, and Shopify Catalog is how your products reach AI channels.
  3. Steps 9 to 12 · BigCommerce branch. Stencil is the theme engine. Custom fields are name and value pairs on the product, and the widget only appears where the theme declares a region for it. Catalyst is the headless frontend that replaces Stencil.
  4. Steps 13 to 16 · When another system touches your data (both platforms). A catalog API lets other applications read and write your products, and a webhook notifies you when something changes. If two systems write the same field you get field overwrite, and content versioning is what lets you know what was published and roll it back.

If your store is on Shopify, read steps 1 to 8 and 13 to 16. To follow a value down that branch, end to end, there is the guide from metafield to published page.

If your store is on BigCommerce, read steps 1 to 3 and 9 to 16. For the same thing on that platform, the guide from widget to published page.

Once the data is on the page, the measurement and verification path shows you how to check it.

Start here

If you are starting from zero, read SSR first and then the term for your platform: metafields if you sell on Shopify, custom fields if you sell on BigCommerce. Then go back to the full path wherever you left off.

1

SSR (server-side rendering)

What arrives in the first HTML response, and why not every bot sees what JavaScript assembles.

5

Shopify metafields

Extra fields on a product, an order or a customer. The theme decides whether they show.

10

BigCommerce custom fields

Name and value pairs on a product. The theme decides where they appear on the page.

The path, step by step

  1. SSR

    Server-side rendering (SSR) is the technique by which the server builds a page's complete HTML before sending it, so the browser or a crawler receives the content already written in the first response.

  2. JavaScript rendering

    JavaScript rendering is the step in which a browser or a crawler runs a page's scripts to get its final content, the one a person sees on screen.

  3. Headless commerce

    Headless commerce is an online store architecture in which the frontend, the part the shopper sees, is separated from the commerce backend, which holds the catalog, cart, payments and orders.

  4. Liquid

    Liquid is the open-source template language Shopify created and the one its store themes are written in.

  5. Metafields

    Shopify metafields are custom fields added to a store resource, such as a product, an order or a customer, to hold data the standard model does not have, such as care instructions or a size guide.

  6. Shopify metaobject

    A Shopify metaobject is a custom record type, with several fields, that a merchant or an app defines to store structured data that does not belong to any standard store resource, such as a size guide or a designer's profile.

  7. Shopify app embed

    A Shopify app embed is a block in an app's theme extension that Shopify inserts before the closing head or body tag, without editing the theme code.

  8. Shopify Catalog

    Shopify Catalog is Shopify's product database for AI channels: it gathers the products of stores that meet its requirements, structures them and distributes them to assistants such as ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot, and exposes them to AI agents through a search API.

  9. Stencil

    Stencil is BigCommerce's theme engine: the system used to build and customize the stores the platform itself hosts, with Handlebars templates, Sass styles and JavaScript.

  10. Custom fields

    BigCommerce custom fields are name-and-value pairs added to a product to show data that has no field of its own, such as a book's ISBN, a shirt's fabric or a wine's vintage.

  11. BigCommerce widget

    A BigCommerce widget is a unit of HTML, CSS and JavaScript content, built on a Handlebars template, that is created with the Widgets API and placed in a region of a Stencil theme.

  12. Catalyst

    Catalyst is BigCommerce's headless storefront framework: an open-source application, built on Next.js and React Server Components, that requests the catalog from the GraphQL Storefront API and uses it to compose the store's pages.

  13. Catalog API

    A catalog API is the programming interface through which an ecommerce platform lets other applications read, create and modify its products, categories and variants without going through the dashboard.

  14. Webhook

    A webhook is an HTTP notification that a platform sends automatically to another application's address when a specific event occurs, such as an order being created or a product changing.

  15. Field overwrite

    Field overwrite is what happens when one system writes a value into a product field, such as the title, the description or a metafield, on top of one stored by another system or a person, and the previous value is lost without warning.

  16. Content versioning

    Content versioning is the practice of saving every version of a published text or data point with its date, its author and what changed, so you can compare them, know what was published at any given moment and go back to an earlier one.

Next, in your store

Guide

From metafield to published page (Shopify)
Guide

From widget to published page (BigCommerce)
Study

From stored data to published data on Shopify and BigCommerce
Reading path

Measurement and verification

Make your catalog easy for bots to read

Clione fills every product page with what bots read best: the JSON-LD graph with its structured data, the meta description and the FAQs. You review and press Push; then we check your live store so it all stays published.

See how Clione works →