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Hello no6thgear, Generally speaking, product detail pages have a much more difficult time ranking for anything other than the specific product name/model. Even then, eCommerce sites are often going up against juggernauts like Amazon, Target, Walmart, eBay, or whoever the leaders are in your niche. If you're using any manufacturer/distributor product descriptions that are shared on other websites, or have a lot of products with "thin" content it will make ranking these pages much more difficult, if not nearly impossible. That said, it IS best practice to link directly to the page instead of relying on rel canonical tags or 301 redirects, which treat them symptom and not the cause. If you can find a way to do this in Shopify I recommend it, though I'm not sure if it would be worth changing eCommerce platforms for if there are no other strong issues supporting the change.

I'm associated with a site that ranked fairly well. Earlier in the summer, the blog was moved from a subfolder to a subdomain for various reasons. While the reasons seemed valid at the time, the site's traffic plummeted about 1-2 weeks later. We've still been trying to analyze as many other changes were made a few weeks prior; however, the arrows are pointing to the subfolder to subdomain change which may have really caused this plague. We're now looking into moving it back to see if it will resolve the problem.

www.ahrefs.com you can see history there. Free version is limited only for some quests daily, but paid one is very good.

I would implement this without the word "catalog".  I don't think that it adds anything of value and the shorter URL might be very very slightly more effective. Not a big deal but I like to toss dead weight overboard.