In one sentence: A metafield is a custom data field a Shopify store owner can attach to a product, collection, page, or other store object to store information the platform's built-in fields do not cover, such as a material, a care instruction, or a size chart.
Shopify's built-in product fields cover the basics: a title, a price, a description, an image. A metafield is an extra field a store defines for itself, attached to a product, a collection, a page, or the store as a whole, to hold information those built-in fields were never designed for. A furniture listing might carry a metafield for assembly time. A candle listing might carry one for burn time. The field itself is just data sitting in the background until a theme is set up to read it and show it on the page.
Metafields come in defined types, such as plain text, a number, a date, or a linked reference to another product, so the data stays consistent from one listing to the next rather than living as a loose sentence buried in a description field. That consistency matters once a store has more than a handful of listings, since a theme can only build a reliable size chart or spec table out of a field that behaves the same way on every product.
Filling in a metafield is only half the job. Something in the theme has to display that field on the page, whether that is a size chart tab, a spec table, or a filter a shopper can narrow a collection by. On a theme that supports it, an owner can connect a metafield to a section setting in the theme editor; where the theme has no setting that fits, the display has to be built into the theme's code. A metafield with nothing pulling it onto the page is invisible to a shopper even though the data exists in the store's back end. That gap, data stored but never displayed, is why some Shopify feature requests turn out to need theme work rather than a settings change.
Metafields are also what let a catalog scale without every product page turning into a wall of manually typed text. Once a spec table or a size chart is wired up to a metafield, updating a single product is a matter of filling in the field, not editing the page layout by hand.
Kelly Webmasters and Marketers sets up metafields and builds the theme changes that put them on the page during a Shopify store build. Shopify store setup covers what that build includes.
A metafield is where a store keeps custom information. How that information gets labeled so search engines can read it is a separate layer, covered under product schema.
Metafields themselves are a built-in Shopify feature, not a paid add-on. The cost, if any, is the work of setting up the fields correctly and building the theme changes needed to display them, which is development time rather than a platform fee.
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