Honeymoon / Duplicate content...

most of my stores were doing somewhat ok for a few months...
now that the honeymoon is over, most of my stores have crashed....
of couse the stores have duplicate content; my guess is google does not
see the stores having dup content as of being high quality, which
i understand, but it seems impossible to manage 1,000 of products
with unique content, and keeping them updated...

Here is the question:

I do have unique content on parts of the site...
and some product page have indexed...

Is it still possible to get indexed pages to rank higher?

But at what cost? Seems like amazon just wants you to
work harder and spend more and more so you can earn
them $$$, and you end up paying them to earn pennies
on the dollar while amazon rides on your back for free....

It just seems pointless sometimes...

 

A few product sites I've seen are indexed at top in SERPs. What do they have? Nothing apart from the same descriptions you'll find on a ton of similar sites. I wonder if Google makes an exception for these!! And that's because for some products, there really isn't anything different to write about. E.g. if you are selling a laptop, the specs. have to be stated exactly as they are given by the manufacturer. You can somewhat change the description, but the gist must not be tampered with.
I don't know if Google has different policies to treat a single page and a whole site as such. It's not feasible to put up a unique description for each product on a site that has thousands of them, I know. But maybe you can try it for a site that has a handful and see how it works. Alternately, you can keep only bestsellers, highly rated and popular items in your store at first to see how it fares in indexing. Then, if and when it starts getting an increasingly higher ranking and consecutively a better position in SERPS, you can expand the store by introducing other products that will fetch a decent commission but are not known so much yet.
And yes, you may need to ask this too –

1. Are product sites listed higher by Google doing anything different from SEO? Or are they doing SEO differently?
2. Are these sites better in some other respects such as visual appeal, ease of navigation, use of social media, updating their potential customers via RSS feeds and news letters, presentation of product price comparison etc.?

My 2c. Hope this helps.