How to sync Zoho custom fields to Shopify metafields

Custom fields are where your product data actually lives — vintage, region, material, warranty length, whatever your business tracks. Zoho's native Shopify connector ignores them completely. Here's how to get them into Shopify metafields without typing each one by hand.

Why custom fields matter (and why native skips them)

In Zoho Inventory, custom fields hold the details that make a product yours. For our wine shop it's vintage, region, and producer; for someone else it's fabric, wattage, or shelf life. On the Shopify side, the equivalent home for that data is a metafield — a structured, named slot attached to a product that themes and apps can read.

The catch: Zoho's native connector moves stock and orders and stops there. It has no concept of your custom fields, so none of that data crosses over. If you want it on your storefront, you're on your own.

The manual way, and why it hurts

Done by hand, syncing one custom field means:

1. Create a metafield definition in Shopify admin (namespace, key, type) that matches the Zoho field.
2. Open each product and type the value in.
3. Repeat for every product, and every field.

Three custom fields across a few hundred products is thousands of little copy-pastes — and a mismatched type or a skipped product is easy to miss. This is the exact chore that doesn't scale.

The automated way, step by step

Here's the flow with Hakwork, which is purpose-built for this gap.

1. Connect Zoho and Shopify

Authorize both over OAuth — independently, so they don't need the same email. Hakwork reads your Zoho items, custom fields and all.

2. Map each custom field to a metafield

In the field-mapping screen, point a Zoho custom field at a Shopify metafield — you choose the namespace and key. For example:

Zoho "Vintage"   →  custom.vintage        (single line text)
Zoho "Region"    →  custom.region         (single line text)
Zoho "ABV"       →  custom.abv_percentage  (number)

If the metafield definition doesn't exist in Shopify yet, Hakwork creates it for you — no digging through Shopify's settings to hand-build each one.

3. Sync and backfill by SKU

Run the sync. Hakwork matches products by SKU and writes the mapped values into the metafields — on new products as it creates them, and on existing products via backfill. Every run streams line-by-line so you can watch it land.

After it's set up

Once the mapping exists, keeping metafields current is just another sync run. Update a value in Zoho, sync, and Shopify catches up — no reopening products. Your theme can then surface vintage, region, or spec data on product pages because it's finally structured data, not free text buried in a description.

Custom fields are one piece of the larger picture. For everything that does and doesn't move between the two platforms, see the complete Zoho to Shopify sync guide.