Multiple Sizes of eCommerce Product Best Practice

[kadesmith]

I sell a product that comes in 9 different sizes, two materials, and two different shapes.  People often search for this product by size, material and shape as follows:

#9 material1 square widget

#5 material2 circle widget

The dilemma I'm facing is should I create 1 page for each of these products resulting in 36 different pages, or should I create one page that the users can select size shape and material?

I'm thinking that from a usability stance, the 36 different pages are easier to navigate and determine price on, but I'm afraid that going the route that is easier for the customer to use in this case could hurt me duplicate content wise.  I'm all about making a good user experience, but don't want to hurt myself because the content on all 9 sizes is basically the same.

Are images of the product enough to be considered non-duplicate content?  I also list out the dimensions of each product, but beyond that there isn't much to delineate the content.

My plan is to create one page with all the content that relates to all of the products as a top level page with links to the individual products broken down, but just wanted to get some feedback from you guys before making the effort.

[EGOL]

You have two different materials and two different shapes.  Each of those materials should have different characteristics and each of those shapes should have different characteristics.

If I owned this site I might create four pages....

Round Wooden Widgets - Size 1 to 9

Square Wooden Widgets - Size 1 to 9

Round Brass Widgets - Size 1 to 9

Square Brass Widgets - Size 1 to 9

Each of these pages would have substantive content.  For example: why brass round widgets are the best for certain people, the best for certain uses and how they compare with the wooden and the square.   These four pages would have very substantive informative content and offer the featured widgets for sale.  Maybe I would have informative content in the right column and images with purchase buttons in the left.

I would attack with pages that are: informative, unique, substantive, well illustrated and transactional.    Do this well and I think you will kick some ass.

If you put the most popular sizes in the title tag that will give them nearly as much relevance as separate pages and the substantive content will compete well against sellers who have one size on skimpy content pages.

Defeat your competitors' content and get your keywords into kickass title tags.

[bradwayland]

I own a site in the custom t-shirt space.  We deal with a similar issue to what you are talking about.  Each product comes in lots of different sizes.  To make matters worse we have several products that are nearly identical with just minor difference being the manufacturer of the goods.  For example hanes, fruit of the loom, gildan all sell a main t-shirt that is pretty much identical with the exception of the tag.  We have always had the sizing information on 1 product page.

I believe you are going to want to focus on 1 page with all the shapes and materials.  I clearly don't know our business but I think I disagree with your assessment about the usability.  I believe it will be more familiar to users as well as easier to manage.  We have had a lot of results filtered out by panda updates because our "commodity" shirts described above are not unique enough.  If you create 36 different pages I think you will be fighting duplicate content for a long time.