E-commerce SEO splits into two different problems. On marketplaces you are optimising inside someone else’s system, competing mainly on listing quality, price and reviews. On your own store you own everything and must generate the demand yourself. The technical difficulties are almost entirely on the second, and the margin is too.
What each channel actually gives you
| Marketplace | Your own store | |
|---|---|---|
| Demand | Already there | You have to earn it |
| Customer relationship | Belongs to the platform | Yours |
| Margin | Compressed by fees and price competition | Yours to set |
| What you optimise | Listing quality, price, reviews | Everything |
| Main risk | Rules and fees change without notice | Slow to build |
| Search visibility | Inside the platform | Open web, including AI answers |
Most Singapore retailers run both, which is sensible. The mistake is treating the two as the same activity, because the work that wins on a marketplace has almost nothing in common with the work that wins on the open web.
The technical problem that dominates own-store SEO
URL proliferation. Filters, sorting options, pagination and product variants combine to generate enormous numbers of crawlable URLs from a modest catalogue. A few hundred products can produce tens of thousands of addresses, most of which are near-identical.
Two consequences follow. Authority splits across many versions of what is effectively one page, so none of them rank as well as a single consolidated version would. And crawl effort is spent on combinations nobody should ever land on, at the expense of pages that matter.
This is the most common serious finding in an e-commerce audit, and it is invisible from the front end — every page loads correctly. It sits alongside the other silent technical faults that suppress sites without producing any obvious symptom.
Why category pages usually matter more than product pages
Because they match how people search. Buyers rarely type an exact product name unless they already know what they want, in which case they are not really discovering anything. They search by type, use case or constraint — and those searches land on category pages.
Category pages are also more durable. Products are discontinued and replaced; a category persists, accumulating authority across years rather than being redirected every time a line changes.
The practical implication is that a thin category page with nothing but a product grid is a wasted asset. It should answer the question the searcher arrived with: what the differences are, what suits which situation, what to avoid.
Product descriptions and the duplication trap
Manufacturer-supplied descriptions appear identically on every retailer selling that product. From a search engine’s perspective there is no reason to prefer your copy over anyone else’s, and usually a larger competitor’s version wins by default.
Rewriting every description is impractical for a large catalogue and unnecessary. Prioritise: products with genuine search demand, high margin, or a real point of difference get original copy. The long tail can carry supplied text, because those pages were never going to rank anyway.
What AI answers change for retail
Product research increasingly begins with a question rather than a product name — what suits a particular situation, what the trade-offs are, what to buy for a specific constraint. Those are exactly the queries answer engines handle, and they draw on content that compares and explains rather than on product pages.
So the content most likely to be cited sits on guides and category pages, not on the product page. That is a reallocation rather than an increase in spend, and it points the same direction as everything else about the shift to AI answers: fewer, more specific, genuinely useful pages.
Frequently asked questions
Should a Singapore retailer sell on marketplaces or their own store?
Most do both, and they serve different purposes. Marketplaces supply demand you do not have to earn but keep the customer relationship and compress margin. Your own store costs more to fill and is the only channel you own outright.
What is the biggest e-commerce SEO problem?
Duplicate and near-duplicate URLs generated by filters, sorting and pagination. A few hundred products can produce tens of thousands of crawlable URLs, which dilutes authority and wastes crawl budget on pages nobody should land on.
Do product descriptions need to be unique?
Yes, if you want the product pages to rank. Manufacturer descriptions appear identically across every retailer selling the item, so there is no reason for a search engine to prefer your copy of it over anyone else’s.
Are category pages more important than product pages?
Usually, for search. Category pages target how people actually search – by type, use case or constraint rather than by exact product name. They are also more stable, since products come and go.
How does AI search affect e-commerce?
Product research increasingly starts with a question rather than a product name. Content that answers comparison and suitability questions is what gets drawn into those answers, and it usually sits on category and guide pages rather than product pages.
If your store has thousands of URLs and a few hundred products, that is worth looking at. Send us the domain and we will tell you how much of the catalogue is competing with itself. See how we handle large catalogues, message us on WhatsApp, or send an enquiry.
Sources
Written by Charlotte Zhang, Operations Partner at Kaizenaire Pte Ltd (UEN 201932071D). Charlotte co-founded Kaizenaire with Ken Tan in 2019 and runs client delivery, after four years in operations at OCBC and HSBC.