If you plan on rolling out products that you just copy & paste the same content that manufacturers and other competitors have - don't. Spend the time and write quality descriptions that are different than your competitors and manufacturer.

Yes, it will take time depending on how many products you have, but it will be worth it in the long run. Especially if this is your bread and butter.

Don't do that its a waste of time and money both. Write your own descriptions. Do research on the products take reviews by having used by others. Sort out the most general queries one individual can have write about it and also the benefits of it. It will take some time but it will make your content unique and help you rank well.

Yes , it does. It hurts seriously. Write unique descriptions.

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My suggestion would be to go for unique content for each of your products in initial stage as this may hamper your effort on getting better seo result. After you got the the business running you may need not to worry about the contents.

In my views duplicate content affects badly to your eCommerce website. You have post to a unique & good quality content which will surely helpful to rank your website.

Nice to see a thread with no misinformation. Yes indeed, duplicate content may indeed hurt your results. If your product descriptions are identical Google may not list them in the main index at all.

Then there's the typical e-commerce content issue that DannyVeiga mentioned - using vendor-provided content that you can probably find on other sites too. It's hard to compete for the exact same product in any case, but you're making it much more harder if the content is a verbatim copy from another site. It's quite likely that your vendor and/or their resellers have more authoritative site than yours.

A local SEO agency did a small study on this. Unfortunately it's available only in Finnish, but they got several products to appear in top 10 after completely rewriting the texts.