E-Commerce SEO: A few dubious questions..

Hi forum,

I am starting to build out an ecommerce store in the cannabis accessories niche (bongs, glass pipes, etc) and I have not built a eCommerce store yet so I am looking for advice.. I hope you can help.

For one, how important is quantity of products? And on that, how important is unique product descriptions? If I have a couple 100 products compared to a competitor with 1000s, will they out rank me most of the time?

I am a link builder, so I am hoping to out link them asap. So I have a couple 100 products right now, if my category page is better optimized and I have better links, would you suppose I can outrank (similar overall authority.)

Boiling it down: How important is actual store quality to google? Does having 50 vendors help significantly against a smaller site with a few vendors?

Thanks! (PS. any advice for this journey at all would be appreciated)

yuh

my 5 cents, you can not rank 1000 products all at once with a new shop unless you were featured on main media outlets so you are good to go with a small quantity.
Just focus on 5 - 10 products and write +1000 words original descriptions with proper subtitles and original photos, obviously work on your titles and descriptions as if you were writing ads, to increase your SERP CTR, finally make sure your website is blazing fast and check for html or java errors which tend to lower your ranking score.