In emerging markets, traditional retailers, typically characterized by small neighborhood stores, follow a “mediated access” selling format in which they stock products inside the stores away from direct access of customers. Under this selling format, the retail stores are manned by shopkeepers who offer products to customers on demand. This affords the retailers an ability to push the demand of certain products by selectively recommending them to their customers. This is in contrast to the “direct access” selling format in which products are displayed on shelves in aisles within direct reach of customers. We build a game theoretic model to study the implications of the mediated access retailer’s ability to selectively recommend products to its customers on profit sharing within the channel, and how it affects the strategies of a manufacturer that can offer multiple horizontally differentiated products. We find that when the manufacturer offers full product variety, the mediated access retailer is able to fully extract the extra surplus generated in the channel by this ability. However, if this ability is high, the manufacturer offers a reduced product variety to handicap the retailer and share this extra surplus. Interestingly, under certain conditions, the retailer commits to handicapping itself by switching to the direct access format, in order to receive a larger product variety from the manufacturer. The results continue to hold when the products offered by the manufacturer are asymmetric in terms of quality or marginal costs, as long as this asymmetry is not very high.