Child Feeds: How to Resell a Catalog at Your Own Margin

Distributors and wholesalers run into the same problem again and again: the "real" catalog has one set of cost prices, but each retail partner needs to see a different, marked-up price, and usually a different margin per partner or per category. The common workaround is a second, hand-maintained copy of the catalog with prices adjusted manually. That works right up until the real catalog changes and someone forgets to update the copy to match.

A child feed is the alternative: a second product feed that reads the parent catalog's products live and applies a margin rule before returning them, instead of storing its own copy at all. Change a cost price in the parent, and every child feed reading from it reflects the new number immediately. There's no second dataset to remember to update, because there isn't one.

How the margin actually gets applied

A margin rule is either a flat percentage or a fixed amount, and you can override it per category. A distributor might mark up electronics 15% and apparel 30%, for instance. The rule lives on the child feed, not the parent, so setting up a second partner with a different margin just means a second child feed with its own rule, not a renegotiation of how the original catalog is structured.

Everything else about a child feed behaves like a normal feed from the outside: it gets its own API keys, its own consumers, its own download links. A partner querying it never sees your cost price, only the margin-adjusted number, and has no way to tell from the API response alone that the data underneath is shared with anyone else.

What a child feed can't do

A child feed has no write access of its own. All product management (adding items, updating stock, changing the real cost price) happens on the parent. This is deliberate - the point is one managed catalog with several priced views onto it, not several independently-editable copies that could drift apart from each other again.

When this is worth setting up

• You sell the same catalog to more than one type of buyer at different price points - wholesale vs. retail, or a different margin per regional partner.
• You're currently maintaining a second spreadsheet or export specifically to mark up prices for a reseller, and keeping it in sync with the real catalog is already a known pain point.
• A distribution partner needs their own API key and their own view of "the catalog," without being handed access to your actual cost data.

How Feedwyre handles this

Turn any product feed into a parent and create child feeds under it with a flat-percentage or fixed-amount margin rule, with an option to override it per category. A child feed reads the parent's products live, with nothing duplicated, and every booking made against it still goes through the same atomic stock check as the parent. A reseller's sale and your own sale can never both oversell the same unit.