Collection level feed settings
Collection level feed settings is one of the components that compose Effective feed settings, which is used to generate the final product feed.
It is accessible from the product group editor page, clicking on each of the collections to show the custom feed settings dialog.
Collections can be involved in a feed group in 2 ways: including collection and excluding collections (or modifying collections)
Including collections
Including collections define the set of the products being included in all the feeds of this group. "All products" is a special collection that include all products in store. All included collections can have collection level feed settings.
Excluding collections
Excluding collections are added either to define exclusivity, or feed settings customization. In the screenshot, the "Apparel" and "vendor fuel" collections are to define exclusivity (the group will include All products, excluding products from the 2 collections), with collection level feed settings disabled.
Modifying collections
Modifying collection started as an excluding collections, but added with custom collection level feed settings.
Click on the Shirt collection to bring up the collection level feed settings form. With at least one settings, the Shirt collection will become "modifying" instead of "excluding".
The following setup will make sure all the products of Shirt collection will have Google product category set to "Shirt & Top". These products will no longer excluded from feeds, but rather become "modified"
Settings at the collection level take precedence over the feed level settings, but less priority than product level feed settings.
Collection level feed settings can be set for both Including collections and Excluding collections.
If set for an excluding collection, it will turn the collection into a modifying collections, with products still included in the feeds, but with customized feed settings
Custom collection data
There are times you might need to pass down data from a collection to its products. This can be done using custom collection tokens.
The idea is to put the data into the custom data tokens (Custom data 0 - 3).
Then the data can be pulled using the corresponding tokens in feed attributes
Then the feed attributes will show up with the collection data