Welcome to the Q&A Forum

We have a couple of e-commerce sites that sell the same product. One focuses more on a niche category of the products, while the others contains a wide variety of products. Will we be hit with a penalty from google if the product descriptions are the same? If so, how much of a difference in content does there need to be? There are only so many ways to describe the product and it is usually done in a couple sentences.  The rest of the product description contains bullet points of the products and is the same for each product. We are also looking for a SEO company to work with and wondered if there are companies out there that specialize in e-commerce seo that can work with a small ($500 month) budget. I've looked through the recommended companies directory here, but it seems most have minimum retainers around $1000 a month. Also, what should I look for in an SEO company?