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The thing is that comments and reviews take time to generate.  If I start these sites and there's a lot of duplicate content for the items listed on both sites for a while, will that cause both sites to be penalized?

Hi,

This may have been discussed here before though I couldn't find a definitive answer, but I was wondering what the best practice for having multiple e-commerce sites with some of the same products on both is.

If Site A has 200 products, and Site B has 300 products, and 50 overlap, do they absolutely have to have unique product descriptions?  The descriptions have already been rewritten to be different from the manufacturer's description, but do they need to be changed again?

Or should the 50 products only be listed on one site or the other?

Sites like csnstores.com seem to have the same descriptions as the subsidiary sites that they have, but maybe they have different sidebars/footers/etc which make the content considered original?

For some of my suppliers, there may be a Model A, Model B, and Model C. Within each model, the height and the width may be the same, but there might be 10 variants of length.

Is is better to just list the 3 models on 3 separate product pages and have the various lengths as an option in a drop-down menu on each page, or should I actually create 30 different product pages?

Just listing 3 would seem to be better from a usability perspective, but having 30 might lead to more pages being indexed.

I believe that I'll have 30 different entries in my Google/Bing Product Search feeds, but what is the recommended practice for actual sites?

Thanks