i have been thinking of adding meta tags to my product descriptions but need to know would this conflict with the meta descriptions for the website
You need 2 meta tags on every page, the description and the keywords. <meta name="keywords" content="xxxxxxxx, xxxxxxxxx" /> <meta name="description" content="Description here." />
every page on my site has the tags in the header but i was thinking of adding them to the product description but need to know if this would work for each individual product if i remove the header tags from the product pages this hopefully then will give me a distinctive meta description and keywords tag for each individual product
Each page of your site should have different meta tags so you are correct in making a tag for each product you have. The tag always needs to be in the <head></head> section of the page though.
how relevant metatags actually are, since google doesn't seem to index them anymore? I think google is using title tag and first words on website.
The meta description tag is used for the snippet next to the search results. Its therefore hugely important.