We have alot of refurbished items, surplus items etc. How should we list them?

[absoauto]

Our E-Commerce company has an abundance of surplus items, refurbished items etc. from returns. It isn't worth spending any time making the product listings, but it would be nice to sell them from our site. I'm worried that in creating these almost "empty" product listings Google will view these pages all as duplicate pages, or pages without unique content because they will really just be an empty, standardized page on the cart with limited text. Even though in reality for customers looking for deals they are very useful pages to get deals, any tips on how to do this?

(We can't justify creating unique pages because most of the offers are "one offs" where once we sell one product we are done with that listing.)

[AndieF]

Good question. In your situation I've seen lots of people set up an "Outlet" store on eBay.

I think you're right about the duplicate content risk, it would pose an issue. You might want to consider noindex'ing those empty products but that would mean they wouldn't be discoverable on Google itself.

Alternatively perhaps if it's a refurbished item you could add a canonical link to the main product's page, and on that main product page link to the empty page so that people can discover it that way.