By default, Shopify has built in metafields also known as, custom fields, that you can leverage to add new fields to your customers profiles and orders for example.

So, if you wanted to gather additional information from your customers, such as their birthday, that's best built through the 'custom fields' section of the Shopify app. When building a custom field though, you'll see the below:

By default, the Namespace will be 'custom' and we recommend leaving it this way. The reason we recommend this is simply that our app will be looking for custom fields built with the namespace, 'custom'. However this can be changed.

Before going into how to change the namespace, let's first learn what it is:

What is the metafields/ custom fields namespace?:

The namespace is simply an identifier, when a custom field is looked up, it needs to be looked up using an identifier. You can imagine it like a box or container named 'custom', when you create a birthday field, gender, pet type etc, and use the namespace 'custom', they all go into the same box. This allows apps like ours to look up the name 'custom' and look what's inside of it, which then allows you to use those fields on the customers account.

How does the customer accounts hub app look up my namespace?:

Really easily, inside of our 'customize > profile builder' and 'customize > order builder', you'll see that right down the bottom, we have a section you can simply type in the namespace you'd like to use.

So if you were to change this to 'my_namespace', for example, then our app will no longer see any fields with the namespace 'custom' and will instead be looking for fields with the namespace 'my_namespace'

How do I change the namespace?:

You might want to update your namespace because you're using another app that has it's own namespace, take for example the 'helium customer fields app', by default they use the namespace, 'customer_fields', so for our app to see these fields (look in the correct box/container), we just need to update the namespace inside of our app to 'customer_fields'. Just head to 'customize > profile builder', scroll to the bottom and change and reload the fields:

Does it matter if I build the namespace or a 3rd party does?:

Not at all, as long as you update the namespace in our app to look for the corresponding namespace our app will see them and they'll be useable.