Most e-commerce sites have a thin-content problem they do not know about. It is not the product pages. It is the category pages.
The merchandising trap
Category architecture in most platforms is driven by merchandising teams, not search intent. This creates hundreds of structurally identical category pages: a heading, a product grid, and pagination. Google sees them as interchangeable with no reason to rank any one above a competitor.
The scale of the problem
We audited a furniture retailer with 2,400 SKUs and found 600 category pages. 540 had fewer than 50 words of unique content. Google indexed 180. The site spent 70% of crawl budget on pages that would never rank.
The replacement pattern
We consolidated 600 categories into 85 hub pages built around search intent clusters, each with 800 to 2,000 words of editorial content alongside products. Organic traffic increased 268% in six months. Revenue attributed to organic reached $4.8M annually.