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 collections and excluding collections (or modifying 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 includes all products in store. All included collections can have collection level feed settings.
Excluding collections are added either to define exclusivity, or feed setting 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 collection started as an excluding collection, but added with custom collection level feed settings.
Click on the "Shirt" collection to bring up the collection level feed setting form. With at least one setting, 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 collection, with products still included in the feeds, but with customized feed settings.
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:
