I agree with Dean above. Subdomains split your authority. Basically, this means that Google considers wow.icey-veins.com and hearthstone.iceyveins.com as two separate websites in their book. For this reason, folders would have been the far better solution - the site's authority would have remained the same and any additional folders added to the site and resulting links to that folder would have continued to build up the website's authority.

Don't get me wrong, there are a number of websites that utilize subdomains (typically very large sites). In fact, it use to be very common in year's past. However, subdomains are no longer seen as SEO best practice. ^Caitlin

Thanks for the input.  In this particular case, the pricing is not an issue as the client has a MAP policy in place so they will actually have a lower or exact match price to their dealers.  The issue is more about the best place for them to be visible and not so much about them selling products through the marketplace.

Does anyone have experience with outcomes on listing your products under grouped search results as opposed to separated out.  It seems that this can be easily accomplished by using a SKU that is different then others in the listing but I wonder if one ranks better over the other (it appears that grouped searched rank a bit higher).  It seems that it would be best to take into consideration the audience you are targeting and what their habits are, i.e. would they be more likely to click on the group searches and look for products that way or do they want to find a reputable brand and would more likely click on that.  Any help or thoughts would be appreciated as I am not really finding any information on this subject.

I agree with Dean above. Subdomains split your authority. Basically, this means that Google considers wow.icey-veins.com and hearthstone.iceyveins.com as two separate websites in their book. For this reason, folders would have been the far better solution - the site's authority would have remained the same and any additional folders added to the site and resulting links to that folder would have continued to build up the website's authority.

Don't get me wrong, there are a number of websites that utilize subdomains (typically very large sites). In fact, it use to be very common in year's past. However, subdomains are no longer seen as SEO best practice. ^Caitlin