If you sell anything personalized, the most important part of the order isn’t the product title — it’s the customization attached to it. The name on the jersey. The initials on the bag. The uploaded artwork. The pickup date. Shopify captures these as line item properties (attached to a specific line) or order note attributes (attached to the whole order), and your storefront or an options app writes them at checkout.
They’re in the order. Getting them out as clean, per-line columns your production team can work from is the hard part.
Line item properties vs. note attributes
The distinction matters for how you export them:
- Line item properties belong to one line. A three-item order can carry three different jersey numbers. Any file that flattens the order to a single row has to either lose two of them or cram them into one cell.
- Order note attributes belong to the order as a whole — a delivery date, a pickup location, a gift message. One value per order, so they survive flattening.
Apps like BOLD Product Options, Infinite Options, Product Customizer, and Zapiet Store Pickup + Delivery all write into one or both of these. So do custom theme fields.
Why the built-in export struggles here
Shopify’s order export has a fixed column set that’s the same for every store. It
can’t have a Jersey Number column, because most stores don’t have jersey
numbers — your custom fields are specific to you, and a universal export can’t know about
them.
The practical result for a production team is a file where the personalization data is either absent or bundled into a single cell that has to be read by eye and retyped. At ten orders a day that’s tedious. At two hundred it’s a source of expensive mistakes — and a misspelled monogram is scrap, not a reprint.
Anything that requires a person to read a value out of one file and type it into another will eventually produce a wrong value. For personalized goods the cost of that error is the whole unit, which is why this is worth automating earlier than it feels like it should be.
Exporting custom fields as real columns
Exportify scans your recent orders and surfaces every line item property
and note attribute it finds as a selectable field. You don’t configure them or map them by
hand — if it’s saved on an order, it shows up in the template builder as
Detected Line Item Custom Attributes and
Detected Order Custom Attributes, ready to add as a column.
Line item properties and custom
attributes in the help centre shows exactly where they appear.
From there you build the file your production floor actually wants:
- Add the custom fields you care about as their own named columns.
- Set one row per line item, so each personalized unit is its own row rather than three values in a shared cell.
-
Rename headers to the shop-floor vocabulary —
Player Name, notcustom_property_Player Name. - Drop the columns nobody on the floor needs. A production sheet with six relevant columns beats one with sixty.
- Filter to unfulfilled orders, or to a tag, so each run is only the work still to do.
Custom attributes are included on every Exportify plan, starting at $14.99 per 30 days with a 15-day free trial.
A worked example
A jersey shop takes orders where each line carries Player Name,
Jersey Number, and Size. The production file they want is one row per
jersey, ordered so the printer can work straight down the sheet:
| Order | Qty | Size | Player Name | Number |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1712 | 1 | L | Ramirez | 24 |
| #1712 | 1 | M | Chen | 11 |
| #1713 | 2 | XL | Okafor | 7 |
Same underlying orders, arranged so that no one has to interpret anything. That arrangement is the entire job — and once it’s saved as a template, tomorrow’s run is identical.
If your setup is unusual — properties that need splitting, conditional columns, uploaded file URLs that have to appear only when present — our support team builds that logic on the Standard and Advanced plans. See the full spec for what’s covered.
