Outranking product/search pages?

So in the past, I always took it as a good sign when I saw the top 10 results being all product pages. They're ranking purely due to their existing on a respectable retailer's site, not because the page is well-optimized or backlinked.

Lately, however, I'm coming across a lot of potential keywords that have 5000+ monthly searches and the top 30 are all just various products, not a single content site to be found. Am I just getting better at finding these keywords, or am I out of the loop and these types of pages are now hard to outrank?

For example, I've just found a "blue widgets" type KW that has 6600 monthly searches, the top 10 is all retailers, and no page in the top 10 has more than 7 total backlinks to the page. Am I wrong in believing this should be easy pickin's?

In my experience, those pages are more difficult to outrank than you think, even if they aren't optimised for the keyword they are ranking for. Read this article: http://www.nichepursuits.com/when-seo-rules-dont-apply-ecommerce-sites-and-other-anomalies/

Exactly the type of answer I was looking for, and pretty much confirmed my suspicions that something seemed a little too good to be true here. Thanks for the good read.