ECommerce products duplicate content issues - is rel="canonical" the answer?

[Confetti_Wedding]

Howdy,

I work on a fairly large eCommerce site, shop.confetti.co.uk. Our CMS doesn't allow us to have 1 product with multiple colour and size options so we created individual product pages for each product variation. This of course means that we have duplicate content issues.

The layout of the shop works like this; there is a product group page (here is our disposable camera group) and individual product pages are below.

We also use a Google shopping feed.

I'm sure we're being penalised as so many of the products on our site are duplicated so, my question is this - is rel="canonical" the best way to stop being penalised and how can I implement it? If not, are there any better suggestions? Also, we have targeted some long-tail keywords in some of the product descriptions so will using rel-canonical effect this or the Google shopping feed?

I'd love to hear experiences from people who have been through similar things and what the outcome was in terms of ranking/ROI.

Thanks in advance.

[IKT]

It is the best way! ... look no further seriously....

[IKT]

wait a second... after i checked out your product pages... the pages looked different (between products)... you might not be penalized for this after all the content of the page (using your so called long tail keywords on product description) have successfully make certain product pages unique...

[Confetti_Wedding]

Thanks for that Yumi. Although some product pages are slightly different, I still think they're too similar to be called 'unique'.