What is considered duplicate content in an ecommerce website that offers the same product for retail and wholesale purchasing?

[flaca]

I have an ecommerce website that offers retail and wholesale products which are identical, of course with the exception of pricing.

My concern is duplicate content. If the same product is offered under both the retail and wholesale category, and described identically, with the exception of price, metadata and a few words, is that considered duplicate content and would both pages be disregarded by the robots?

Is it best to avoid the same description for that one product under the two separate categories?

Thanks for all your help!

[flaca]

Thank you so much for your quick response, I appreciate it greatly. I think I have a much better direction now.

Thanks again, gracias!

[AnthonyMangia]

Ana -

Great question.  You certainly want to address this issue, especially in the post-Panda world we live in today.

If you have the ability to re-write your product descriptions and make the pages as unique as possible, this is the most attractive option.  Think of it as a way to re-target your product descriptions to sell to wholesalers.  The only downside to this is the potential for keyword cannabilization, although you could theoretically target different keywords for wholesalers than you do to individuals.

If you don't have the means to make that happen (read: thousands of products), you may want to look into using the rel="canonical" tag.  This will let Google know which page is the "right" page for them to be looking at.  If the majority of your web conversions from organic search are retail, then perhaps the retail pages should be the "canonical" version, or vice-versa.

[BTeubner]

I think it could be argued differently but, if the products are identical, I'd pick one of the categories and try to keep the SE's out of the other. Probably be best to pick the category that will apply to most 'prospects'. Could use canonical, disallow in robots, etc.

You can't apply tiered pricing via your CMS and display wholesale pricebreaks? Then you could just link to the same product page (URL) from each different category.