Ecommerce: remove duplicate product pages or use rel=canonical

[birchlore]

Say we have a white-widget that is in our white widget collection and also in our wedding widget collection. Currently, we have 3 different URLs for that product (white-widgets/white-widget and wedding-widgets/white-widget and all-widgets/white-widget).We are automatically generating a rel=canonical tag for those individual collection product pages that canonical the original product page (/all-widgets/white-widget). This guide says that is the structure Zappos uses and says "There is an elegance to this approach. However, I would re-visit it today in light of changes in the SEO world."
I noticed that Zappos, and many other shops now actually just link back to the parent product page (e.g. If I am in wedding widget section and click on the widget, I go to all-products/white-widget instead of wedding-widgets/white-widget).So my question is:Should we even have these individual product URLs or just get rid of them altogether? My original thought was that it would help SEO for search term "white wedding widget" to have a product URL wedding-widget/white-widget but we won't even be taking advantage of that by using rel=canonical anyway.

[KarlBantleman]

Hi Jackson,

It would be better if there was just one uniform URL for the product but for some websites that have thousands of products it is just too big a development cost so they get around it by using the canonical tag, this is perfectly fine and there aren't any issues from an SEO perspective. So if you can, I'd change it so that there is one URL per product but there is nothing wrong with using the canonical tag