Are small sellers penalized by search engines?

[rsalan]

If there is a section of the site that's dedicated to small sellers setting up shop on e-commerce marketplaces, please direct me. I couldn't find it so I'll try asking a question here (newbie, so please be kind) -

I've read and had an SEO "expert" tell me that there can be problems for small sellers listing the same products EXACTLY on multiple sites. Let's say I sell on Bonanzle and Esty - can I have duplicate listings or is this going to get me into trouble? Thanks for your help!

[mshah]

That's a good question, but if you look at some of the bigger online retailers, they tend to use canned product descriptions provided by their suppliers and it doesn't seem to hurt them that the exact same product descriptions are on lots of other sites.

[irahat]

I think that's a little different (your mention of suppliers providing product descriptions) because the retail Web site still has control over the tags / source code of the page. Small sellers don't have access to the code and can't optimize in that way - they have to rely totally on their content on these sites.

Should they alter their content or is the fact that they are on a different selling site with different source code (albeit not optimized for their listing) good enough? Thanks.